Abraham Lincoln Volume 1 The Prairie Years Carl Sandburg

2*1 5

2292

dandburg, Carl

Abraham Lincoln

vol.1

■

92 Lincoln

itmn

nfiipn

it 11 p n dp

Out of his definitive six-volume work on Lincoln and his
times, Carl Sandburg has written this superb 430,000 word
biography. These volumes have sold over 1,200,000 copies
in high-priced editions. Now for the first time they are pub-
lished in an inexpensive three-volume paperback edition.
Here is Volume I, The Prairie Years. Volume II contains
The War Years (1861-1864); Volume III, The War Years
(1864-1865).

carl sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on
January 6, 1878. He graduated from Lombard College in
Galesburg, and has since received honorary degrees from
Harvard, Yale, New York University, Northwestern, Knox
College, Wesleyan University, Syracuse University, Lafay-
ette, Rollins, Augustana and Dartmouth. At thirty he mar-
ried Lillian Steichen, sister of the great photographer. He
has been Secretary to the Mayor of Milwaukee, private in
the U.S. Army, newspaper correspondent, editorial writer,
film writer, folk song recitalist, poet and Lincoln biogra-
pher. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1950)
and the gold medal for history given by the American
Academy of Arts and Letters (1952), Sandburg has won
several literary awards. His published works begin with
Chicago Poems (1915) and are still appearing. Remem-
brance Rock, his only novel, appeared in 1948. ABRA-
HAM LINCOLN: THE PRAIRIE YEARS was first
published in 1926, and THE WAR YEARS in 1939.

VOLUME I
THE PRAIRIE YEARS

A

CARL SANDBURG

Abraham Lincoln

THE PRAIRIE YEARS and THE WAR YEARS

in three volumes

A Laurel Edition

Htpfy* vy ironan moon

000000W1711

Published by

DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.
750 Third Avenue
New York 17, N. Y.

© Copyright, 1954, by Carl Sandburg

© Copyright, 1925, 1926, by the Pictorial Review

Company renewed by Carl Sandburg
© Copyright, 1926, by Hareourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

Renewed by Carl Sandburg
© Copyright, 1939, by Hareourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
© Copyright, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, by Carl Sandburg

Laurel ® TM, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

All rights reserved

Reprinted by arrangement with
Hareourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
New York, N. Y.

Designed and produced by

Western Printing & Lithographing Company

First Dell printing— October, 1959
Second Dell printing — January, 1960

Printed in U.S.A.

A B

uxJrvu\j

Dedication

To Harry and Marion Dolors Pratt, a handsome team of
Lincoln scholars, who gave time and care to the new
manuscript of the Prairie Years, wherefore the author
is responsible for possible inaccuracies or errors —

To Paul M. Angje, a hardened veteran in the Lincoln field,
a man of good will who can be relentlessly logical while
hoping he is not "magisterial" in tone —

To Benjamin P. Thomas, a ballplayer and farmer who is a
man of learning and integrity, possessed by Lincoln's
dream of "man's vast future," a citizen with a deep and
keen anxiety about the American Dream —

To Allan Nevins, whose four-volume Ordeal of the Union
and Emergence of Lincoln axe a massive and vivid
presentation of the fourteen-year national scenes in
which Lincoln moved in silence or speech till his first
inaugural —

To the departed friends Lloyd Lewis, Oliver Barrett, Alf
Harcourt, Stevie Benet, Jim Randall, Douglas Free-
man, Henry Horner, Jake Buchbinder, whose shadows
linger and whose fellowship endures —

To Edward Steichen, whose projected photographic exhibi-
tion 'The Family of Man" will register his faith joined
to Lincoln's in the unity of mankind and the hope of
"freedom for all men everywhere" —

T<j my wife, Paula, whose counsel was ever of help and
whose many ready and cheerful attentions are a part
of this book —

To Catherine McCarthy, whose exacting toils in the com-
pression of a six-volume work into one volume, whose
skills, perspicacity and devotion are beyond praise, who
merits an armful of roses in token of affectionate re-
gard.

To the faithful toilers on an incessantly changing manu-
script: Helga Sandburg Golby, Marjorie Arnette Braye,
Mari Jinishian, Mrs. Carl Sandburg.

CONTEN TS

VOLUME I — THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Prologue 10
Preface 17

1. Wilderness Beginnings 21

2. New Salem Days 50

3. The Young Legislator 79

4. Lawyer in Springfield 104

5. "I Am Going To Be Married" 128

6. Running for Congress 143

7. Congressman Lincoln 164

8. Back Home in Springfield 180

9. Restless Growing America 198

10. The Deepening Slavery Issue 221

11. The Great Debates 231

12. Strange Friend and Friendly Stranger 245

13. "Only Events Can Make a President" 258

14. "Mary, We're Elected" 277

15. The House Dividing 301

16. "I Bid You an Affectionate Farewell" 314

VOLUME n — THE WAR YEARS, 1861-1864

1. America Whither?

— Lincoln Journeys to Washington 9

2. Lincoln Takes the Oath as President 33

3. Sumter and War Challenge — Call for Troops

4. Jefferson Davis — His Government 77 L

5. Turmoil — Fear — Hazards 84

6. Bull Run— McClellan— Fremont

—The Trent Affair 100

7. The Politics of War— Corruption 129

8. Donelson — Grant — Shiloh — Monitor and

Merrimac — "Seven Days"— The Draft 151

9. Second Bull Run— Bloody Antietam — Chaos 177

10. The Involved Slavery Issue

—Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation 195

11. McClellan's "Slows"— Election Losses

— Fredericksburg — '62 Message 212

12. Thunder over the Cabinet— Murfreesboro 227

13. Final Emancipation Proclamation, '63 244

14. "More Horses Than Oats"— Office Seekers 253

15. Hooker— Chancellorsville— Calamity 265

16. Will Grant Take Vicksburg? 283

17. Deep Shadows— Lincoln in Early '63 290

18. The Man in the White House 317

19. Gettysburg — Vicksburg Siege

—Deep Tides, '63 351

20. Lincoln at Storm Center 374

21. Chickamauga— Elections Won, '63 386

22. Lincoln Speaks at Gettysburg 400

23. Epic '63 Draws to a Close 415

24. Grant Given High Command, '64 433

VOLUME IH — THE WAR YEARS, 1864-1865

25. Will His Party Renominate Lincoln? 455

26. Jay Cooke — Cash for War

—Hard Times and Flush 474

27. Chase Thirsts to Run for President 486

28. Spring of '64 — Blood and Anger 504

29. / Grant's Offensive, *64— Free Press

—Lincoln Visits the Army 523

30. The Lincoln- Johnson Ticket of the

National Union Party 532
.31. Washington on the Defensive
— Peace Babblings 545

32. "The Darkest Month of the War"

—August '64 566

33. The Fierce Fall Campaign of '64 587

34. Lincoln's Laughter— and His Religion 607

35. The Pardoner 635

36. The Man Who Had Become the Issue 659

37. Election Day, November 8, 1864 686

38. Lincoln Names a Chief Justice 693

39. The "Lost Army"— The South in Fire

and Blood— War Prisons 697

40. The Bitter Year of '64 Comes to a Close 720

41. "Forever Free"

—The Thirteenth Amendment 738

42. Heavy Smoke— Dark Smoke 744

43. The Second Inaugural 768

44. Endless Executive Routine 775

45. Lincoln Visits Grant's Army

— Grant Breaks Lee's Line 785

46. Richmond Falls — Appomattox 803

47. "Not in Sorrow, but in Gladness of Heart" 816

48. Negotiations — An Ominous Dream 821

49. The Calendar Says Good Friday 827

50. Blood on the Moon 839

51. Shock — The Assassin

—A Stricken People 856

52. A Tree Is Best Measured when It's Down 874

53. Vast Pageant— Then Great Quiet 885
Sources and Acknowledgments 896
Index 905

Prologue

The Congressional Record for February 12, 1959,
carries the following reproduction of Carl Sand-
burg's address to a joint session of Congress com-
memorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of
Abraham Lincoln.

the speaker. And now it becomes my great pleasure, and
I deem it a high privilege, to be able to present to you the
man who in all probability knows more about the life, the
times, the hopes, and the aspirations of Abraham Lincoln
than any other human being. He has studied and has put on
paper his conceptions of the towering figure of this great
and this good man. I take pleasure and I deem it an honor
to be able to present to you this great writer, this great his-
torian, Carl Sandburg. [Applause, the Members rising.]
mr. sandburg. Before beginning this prepared address, I
must make the remark that this introduction, this reception
here calls for humility rather than pride. I am well aware of
that.

Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on
earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock
and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind
the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and
perfect. Here and there across centuries come reports of
men alleged to have these contrasts. And the incomparable
Abraham Lincoln born 150 years ago this day, is an ap-
proach if not a perfect realization of this character. In the
time of the April lilacs in the year 1865, on his death, the
casket with his body was carried north and west a thousand
miles; and the American people wept as never before; bells
sobbed, cities wore crepe; people stood in tears and with
hats off as the railroad burial car paused in the leading cities

Prologue 11

of seven States ending its journey at Springfield, 111., the
hometown. During the 4 years he was President he at times,
especially in the first 3 months, took to himself the powers
Of a dictator; he commanded the most powerful armies till
then assembled in modern warfare; he enforced conscription
of soldiers for the first time in American history; under im-
perative necessity he abolished the right of habeas corpus;
he directed politically and spiritually the wild, massive tur-
bulent forces let loose in civil war, a war [to avoid which]
he argued and pleaded for compensated emancipation of the
slaves. The slaves were property, they were on the tax books
along with horses and cattle, the valuation of each slave
written next to his name on the tax assessor's books. Failing
to get action on compensated emancipation, as a Chief Ex-
ecutive having war powers he issued the paper by which he
declared the slaves to be free under military necessity. In the
end nearly $4 billion worth of property was taken away
from those who were legal owners of it, property confis-
cated, wiped out as by fire and turned to ashes, at his insti-
gation and executive direction. Chattel property recognized
and lawful for 300 years was expropriated, seized without
payment.

In the month the war began he told his secretary, John
Hay:

My policy is to have no policy.

Three years later in a letter to a Kentucky friend made
public, he confessed plainly:

I have been controlled by events.

His words at Gettysburg were sacred, yet strange with a
color of the familiar:

We cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow— this
ground. The brave men, living and dead, who strug-
gled here, have consecrated it, far beyond our poor
power to add or detract.

He could have said "the brave Union men." Did he have
a purpose in omitting the word "Union"? Was he keeping
himself and his utterance clear of the passion that would
not be good to look back on when the time came for peace

12

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

and reconciliation? Did he mean to leave an implication
that there were brave Union men and brave Confederate
men, living and dead, who had struggled there? We do not
know, of a certainty. Was he thinking of the Kentucky
father whose two sons died in battle, one in Union blue, the
other in Confederate gray, the father inscribing on the stone
over their double grave, "God knows which was right"? We
do not know. His changing policies from time to time aimed
at saving the Union. In the end his armies won and his Na-
tion became a world power. In August of 1864 he wrote a
memorandum that he expected in view of the national situ-
ation, he expected to lose the next November election. That
month of August was so dark. Sudden military victory
brought the tide his way; the vote was 2,200,000 for him
and 1,800,000 against him. Among his bitter opponents
were such figures as Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the
telegraph, and Cyrus H. McCormick, inventor of the farm
reaper. In all its essential propositions the southern Confed-
eracy had the moral support of powerful, respectable ele-
ments throughout the north, probably more than a million
voters believing in the justice of the southern cause. While
the war winds howled he insisted that tfce Mississippi was
one river meant to belong to one country, that railroad con-
nection from coast to coast must be pushed through and the
Union Pacific Railroad made a reality. While the luck of
war wavered and broke and came again, as generals failed
and campaigns were lost, he held enough forces of the north
together to raise new armies and supply them, until generals
were found who made war as victorious war has. always
been made, with terror, frightfulness, destruction, and on
both sides, North and South, valor and sacrifice past words
of man to tell. In the mixed shame and blame of the im-
mense wrongs of two crashing civilizations, often with noth-
ing to say, he said nothing, slept not at all, and on occa-
sions he was seen to weep in a way that made weeping ap-
propriate, decent, majestic. As he rode alone on horseback
near Soldiers Home on the edge of .Washington one night
his hat was shot off; a son he loved died as he watched at
the bed; his wife was accused of betraying information to
the enemy, until denials from him were necessary. An Indi-

Prologue 13

ana man at the White House heard him say, "Vorhees, don't
it seem strange to you that I, who could never so much as
cut off the head of a chicken, should be elected, or selected,
into the midst of all this blood?" He tried to guide General^
Nathaniel Prentiss Banks, a Democrat, three times Gov-
ernor of Massachusetts, in the governing of some 17 of the
48 parishes of Louisiana controlled by the Union armies, an
area holding a fourth of the slaves of Louisiana. He would
like to see the State recognize the emancipation proclama-
tion:

And while she is at it, I think it would not be objec-
tionable for her to adopt some practical system by
which the two races could gradually lift themselves
out of their old relation to each other, and both come
out better prepared for the new. Education for the
young blacks should be included in the plan.

To Gov. Michel Hahn, elected in 1864 by a niajority of
the 11,000 white male voters who had taken the oath of al-
legiance to the Union, Lincoln wrote:

Now you are about to have a convention which,
among other things, will probably define the elective
franchise, I barely suggest for your private considera-
tion, whether some of the colored people may not be
let in — as for instance the very intelligent and espe-
cially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.

Among the million words in the Lincoln utterance rec-
ord, he interprets himself with a more keen precision than
someone else offering to explain him. His simple opening of
the House divided speech in 1858 serves for today:

If we could first know where we are, and whither
we are tending we could better judge what to do, and
how to do it.

To his Kentucky friend, Joshua F. Speed, he wrote in
1855:

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be
pretty rapid. As a Nation we began by declaring that

14 THE PRAIRIE YEARS ^

"all men are created equal, except Negroes." When
the know-nothings get control, it will read "all men are
created equal except Negroes and foreigners and Cath-
olics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating
to some country where they make no pretense of loving
liberty.

Infinitely tender was his word from a White House bal-
cony to a crowd on the White House lawn:

I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man's
bosom. '

Or to a military Governor:

I shall do nothing through malice; what I deal with
is too vast for malice.

He wrote for Congress to read on December 1, 1862:

In times like the present men should utter nothing
for which they would not willingly be responsible
through time and eternity.

Like an ancient psalmist he warned Congress:

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We will
be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal sig-
nificance or insignificance can spare one or another of
us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us
down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.

Wanting Congress to break and forget past traditions his
words came keen and flashing:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the
stormy present. We must think anew, we must act
anew, we must disenthrall ourselves.

They are the sort of words that actuated the mind and
will of the men who created and navigated that marvel of
the sea, the Nautilus, and her voyage from Pearl Harbor
and under the North Pole icecap.

The people of many other countries take Lincoln now for
their own. He belongs to them. He stands for decency, hon-

Prologue 15

est dealing, plain talk, and funny stories. "Look where he
came from — don't he know all us stragglers and wasn't he
a kind of tough straggler all his life right up to the finish?"
Something like that you can hear in any nearby neighbor-
hood and across the seas. Millions there are who take him
as a personal treasure. He had something they would like
to sqe spread everywhere over the world. Democracy? We
cannot say exactly what it is, but he had it. In his blood
and bones he carried it. In the breath of his speeches and
writings it is there. Popular government? Republican insti-
tutions? Government where the people have the say-so, one
way or another telling their elected leaders what they want?
He had the idea. It is there in the lights and shadows of his
personality, a mystery that can be lived but never fully
spoken in words.

Our good friend, the poet and playwright Mark Van
Doren, tells us:

To me, Lincoln seems, in some ways, the most inter-
esting man who ever livedrHe was gentle but this gen-
tleness was combined with a terrific toughness, an iron
strength.

And how did Lincoln say he would like to be remem-
bered? Something of it is in this present occasion, the at-
mosphere of this room. His beloved friend, Representative
Owen Lovejoy, of Illinois, had died in May of 1864, and
friend* wrote to Lincoln and he replied that the pressure of
duties kept him from joining them in efforts for a marble
monument to Lovejoy, the last sentence of Lincoln's letter,
saying:

Let him have the marble monument along with the
well-assured and more enduring one in the hearts of
those who love liberty, unselfishly, for all men.

Today we may say, perhaps, that the well-assured and
most enduring memorial to Lincoln is invisibly there, to-
day, tomorrow, and for a long time yet to come. It is there
in the hearts of lovers of liberty, men and women — this
country has always had them in crisis — men and women

16 THE PRAIRIE YEARS \

who understand that wherever there is freedom there have
been those who fought, toiled, and sacrificed for it.
I thank you. [Applause, the Members rising.]

BENEDICTION

the speaker. The benediction will be pronounced by Dr.
Frederick Brown Harris, Chaplain of the U. S. Senate.
dr. Harris. Our Father God, from this national sacrament
of gratitude and memory, with the winged words of a
prophet of our day lodged in our hearts, with the light of
Thy countenance lifted upon us,

Send us forth into this testing, trying time with thfe faith
and patience of Thy servant, Abraham Lmcom— like him—

To be true to all truth the world denies,
Not tongue-tied by its gilded lies;
Not always right in all men's eyes,
But faithful to the light within.

Amen.

Preface

As a growing boy in an Illinois prairie town I saw marching
men who had fought under Grant and Sherman; I listened to
stories of old-timers who had known Abraham Lincoln. At
twenty in 1898 I served in the 6th Illinois Volunteers, our
expedition to Porto Rico being commanded by General Nel-
son A. Miles, a brigadier general in some of the bloodiest
battles of the Army of the Potomac in 1864. Our uniforms
were the same light blue trousers and dark blue jackets with
brass buttons as worn by the troops of the Army of the Po-
tomac. We took swims in the Potomac River and had our
first salt water swim in Charleston Harbor in sight of Fort
Sumter. .

The Lincoln lore of that time and place was of the man
in his Illinois background and settings. When for thirty
years and more I planned to make a certain portrait of
Abraham Lincoln, it was as the country lawyer and prairie
politician. But when I finished my Prairie Years portrait,
Lincoln the Man had grown on me so that I went* on to
write The War Years. Now twenty-eight years after publi-
cation of the two-volume Prairie Years and nearly fifteen
years after publication of the four-volume War Years, I
have tried to compress the essential story of Lincoln the
Man and President into one volume,

I have in this work, of course, consulted and made use of
such new materials and researches as throw added light on
the life and personality of Lincoln. Since the writing of The
: Prairie Years in the early 1920's there have been some thirty
years of fiercely intensive research on the life of Lincoln
before he became president. In no thirty-year period since
the death of Lincoln has so rigorous and thorough an exam-
ination been given the facts and myths of the life of Lin-
coln. Listed separately at the end of volume 3 are my

18

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

"Sources and Acknowledgments." One may with no harm
quote from Paul M. Angle: "I am convinced that annota-
tion irritates almost everyone except professional historians
... Still, if he is to play fair with his readers, the historical
writer can hardly omit all mention of the materials he has
used." Or from James G. Randall the cryptic: "Perhaps in
general footnotes should be held guilty unless proved inno-
cent." In all but four instances the texts as written by Lin-
coln, or as published, are followed literally without the use
of [sic]. In three of these instances Lincoln stuttered in writ-
ing, but it is certain he did not stutter in speaking.

Walt Whitman saw Lincoln as "the grandest figure on the
crowded canvas of the drama of the nineteenth century." In
the story of a great pivotal figure at the vortex of a vast
human struggle, we meet gaps and discrepancies. The teller
of the story reports, within rigorous space limits, what is to
him plain, moving, revealing. Every biographer of Lincoln
is under compulsion to omit all or parts of Lincoln letters
and speeches that he would like to include; this in part ex-
plains why any Lincoln biography is different from any or
all other Lincoln biographies; each must choose and decide
what sentences or paragraphs shed the light needed for the
Lincoln portrait and story. Supposing all could be told, it
would take a far longer time to tell it than was taken to
enact it in life.

Here and there exist Lincoln letters not yet published but
there are no expectations that they will throw important
fresh light. As recently as February 1954 came the first pub-
lication of letters of Lincoln to Judge David Davis, which
I have used herein as throwing slightly deeper gleams on
Lincoln as a master politician. A national event was the
opening at midnight on July 26, 1947, the "unveiling" as
some termed it, of the long secret Robert T. Lincoln Collec-
tion in the Library of Congress. The next five days I did my
best at reporting in seven newspaper columns for a syndi-
cate what was revealed in the 18,300 letters, telegrams,
manuscripts, miscellaneous data. The fourteen Lincoln
scholars and authors present agreed that while no new light
of importance was shed on Lincoln, the documents deep-

/

Preface 19

eipjd and sharpened the outlines of the massive and subtle
Ifncoln as previously known. When I mentioned to Paul
Angle a cynical editorial writer referring to us as "hagiogra-
phers" (saint worshippers), Paul said, "We could use a few
real saints in this country now. And it's nice to live in a
country where you can pick the saints you prefer to wor-
ship so long as you don't interfere with other saint wor-
shippers."

Having read the million-word record of Lincoln's
speeches and writings several times, Roy P. Basler sets
forth, "The more fully Lincoln's varied career is traced . . .
thq more his genius grows and passes beyond each interpre-
tation." Yankee Gamaliel Bradford put it briefly: "He still
smiles and remains impenetrable."

To Joseph Fifer, Civil War soldier and later governor of
Illinois, his favorite tribute to Lincoln was anonymous till
after a six-year search he found that Homer Koch of Kansas
spoke it in the House of Representatives February 12, 1923 :

"There is no new thing to be said about Lincoln. There is
no new thing to be said of the mountains, or of the sea, or
of the stars. The years go their way, but the same old moun-
tains lift their granite shoulders above the drifting clouds;
the same mysterious sea beats upon the shorej the same
silent stars keep holy vigil above a tired world. But to the
mountains and sea and stars men turn forever in unwearied
homage. And thus with Lincoln. For he was a mountain in
grandeur of soul, he was a sea in deep undervoice of mystic
loneliness, he was a star in steadfast purity of purpose and
service. And he abides."

On the 100th birthday anniversary of Lincoln, Brazilian
Ambassador Joaquin Nabuco said: "With the increased
velocity of modern changes, we do not know what the world
will be a hundred years hence. For sure, the ideals of the
generation of the year 2000 will not be the same of the gen-
eration of the year 1900. Nations will then be governed by
currents of political thought which we can no more antici-
pate than the seventeenth century could anticipate the po-
litical currents of the eighteenth, which still in part sway
us, But whether the spirit of authority, or that of freedom,

20 THE PRAIRIE YEARS \

increases, Lincoln's legend will ever appear more luminous
in the amalgamation of centuries, because he supremely in-
carnated both those spirits."

Carl Sandburg

Connemara Farm

Flat Rock t North Carolina

May 5, 1954

Chaper 1

Wilderness Beginnings

In the year 1776, when the 13 American colonies gave to
the world their famous Declaration of Independence, there
was a captain of Virginia militia living in Rockingham
County named Abraham Lincoln. He had a 210-acre farm
deeded to him by his father, John Lincoln, one of the many
English, Scotch, Irish, German, Dutch settlers who were
taking the green hills and slopes of the Shenandoah Valley
and putting their plows to unbroken ground long held by
the Indians. These Lincolns in Virginia came from Berks
County in Pennsylvania and traced back to Lincolns in New
England and Old England. There was a strain of Quaker
blood in them; they were a serene, peaceable, obstinate
people.

Abraham Lincoln had taken for a wife Bathsheba Her-
ring, who bore him three sons, Mordecai, Josiah and
Thomas, and two daughters, Mary and Nancy. This family
Abraham Lincoln moved to Kentucky in 1782. For years his
friend Daniel Boone, coming back from trips to Kentucky,
had been telling of valleys there rich with black land and
blue grass, game and fish, tall timber and clear running
waters. It called to him, that country Boone talked about,
where land was 40 cents an acre. Abraham Lincoln sold his
farm; they packed their belongings and joined a party head-
ing down the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap
and up north and west into Kentucky. Abraham Lincoln lo-
cated on the Green River, where he filed claims for more
than 2,000 acres.

One day about two years later, he was working in a field
with his three sons, and they saw him in a spasm of pain fall
to the ground, just after the boys heard a rifle shot and the
whine of a bullet The boys yelled to each other, "Indians!"

22 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Mordecai ran to a cabin nearby, Josiah started across fields
and woods to a fort to bring help. Six-year-old Tom stooped
over his father's bleeding body and wondered what he could
do. He looked up to see an Indian standing over him, a shin-
ing bangle hanging down over the Indian's shoulder close
to the heart. Then Tom saw the Indian's hands clutch up-
ward, saw him double with a groan and crumple to the
ground. Mordecai with a rifle at a peephole in the cabin had
aimed his shot at the shining bangle. Little Tom was so
near he heard the bullet plug its hole into the red man.

Thomas Lincoln, while growing up, lived in different
places in Kentucky with kith and kin, sometimes hiring out
to farmers, mostly in Washington County. Betweenwhiles
he learned the carpenter's trade and cabinetmaking. In his
full growth he was about five feet nine, weighed about 185
pounds, his muscles and ribs close-knit. His dark hazel eyes
looked out from a round face, from under coarse black
hair. He could be short-spoken or reel off sayings, yarns,
jokes. He made a reputation as a storyteller. He had little or
no time for books, could read some, and could sign his
name.

Thomas Lincoln at 19 had served in the Kentucky state
militia. At 24 he was appointed a constable in Cumberland
County. The next year he moved to Hardin County and
served on a jury. He was trusted by a sheriff and paid by
the county to guard a prisoner for six days. In the county
jail he could see men bolted behind bars for not paying their
debts and at the public whipping post both white and black
men lashed on their naked backs. He saw prisoners in the
stocks kneeling with hands and head clamped between two
grooved planks; if a prisoner was dead drunk he was laid
on his back with his feet fastened in the stocks till he was
sober.

In 1803 Thomas Lincoln for "the sum of 118 pounds in
hand paid" bought a 238-acre tract near Mill Creek, seven
miles north pf Elizabethtown, the county seat of Hardin
County. In March 1805 he was one of the four "patrollers"
appointed in Hardin County to seize suspicious white char-

/ Wilderness Beginnings 23

aq|6rs or Negro slaves roving without permits. In March
1|06 he was hired by Bleakley & Montgomery, storekeepers
icf Elizabethtown, to take a flatboat of their merchandise
down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, earn-
ing 16 pounds in gold and a credit of 13 pounds in gold. Ac-
count books of the store had him occasionally buying "two
twists of tobacco," one pound for 38 cents, and one pint of
whisky for 21 cents.

And the books show that in May 1806 he went on a buy-
ing spree, purchasing "four skeins of silk," "five yards of
linen," "four yards of coating," "one-fourth yard of scarlet
cloth," several yards of "Jane" and of "Brown Holland,'*
"three and one-half yards of cassemere," "one and one-
quarter yards of red flannel," dozens of buttons, and other
sundries. Earlier that year he had bought an aristocratic
beaver hat for one pound six shillings and a pair of silk
suspenders for $1.50. He was courting a woman he meant to
marry and was buying clothes and dress goods intended for
his bride and himself.

Thomas Lincoln was in love and his wedding set for
June 12, 1806, at Beechland in Washington County. Nancy
Hanks, the bride-to-be, was a daughter of Lucy Hanks and
was sometimes called Nancy Sparrow as though she was an
adopted daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow whose
house was her home.

Lucy Hanks had welcomed her child Nancy into life in
Virginia about 1784. The name of the child's father seems
to have vanished from any documents or letters that may
have existed. His name stayed unknown to baffle and mys-
tify the seekers who for years searched for records and
sought evidence that might bring to light the name of the
father of the girl child Nancy Hanks.

Lucy traveled to Kentucky carrying what was to her a
precious bundle. She was perhaps 19 when she made this
trip. She could toss her bundle into the air against a far,
hazy line of blue mountains, catch it in her two hands as it
came down, let it snuggle to her breast and feed, while she
asked, "Here we come — where from?" If Lucy was mar-
ried when Nancy was born it seemed that her husband either

24 THE PRAIRIE YEARS \

died and she became a widow or he lived and stayed in Vir-
ginia or elsewhere. In either case she and their child had to
get along as best they could without him.

Of how and where she lived in the years she was raising
Nancy not much was remembered or recorded. There were
those who said later that it was another Lucy Hanks, not
the mother of Nancy, who was indicted November 24, 1789,
by a grand jury in Mercer County Court for loose and
shameless conduct with men. Months passed and there was
no record of a trial of the Lucy Hanks indicted. In those
months there came deeply into the life of the mother of
Nancy a man named Henry Sparrow, Virginia-born, about
her own age, a Revolutionary War veteran who had seen
Lord Cornwallis' army surrendered to George Washington.
Since his father's death in 1789 he had been caring for his
widowed mother, sister and younger brother.

On April 26, 1790, Henry Sparrow, with a brother-in-law,
s John Daniel, gave bond for a license of marriage between
himself and Lucy Hanks. On this same day Lucy Hanks,
one of the few women of the time and locality who could
read and write, wrote a certificate:

I do sertify that I am
of age and give my appro-
bation freely for henry
Sparrow to git out Lisons
this or enny other day
Given under my hand
this day

April 26th 1790
day
Lucey
Hanks

Undersigned as witnesses were Robert Mitchell and John
Berry, perhaps the same John Berry who had served on the
jury that had indicted one Lucy Hanks. In the following
May the Mercer County Court in the case "against Lucy
Hanks, deft [defendant]" made a presentment recorded, "for
reasons appearing to the court the suit is ordered to be dis-

Wilderness Beginnings 25

Continued." Whatever they meant by their indictment was
wiped out as though she had changed for the better or they
had been wrong in naming her in an indictment.

Nearly a year passed and Lucy Hanks and her way of liv-
ing pleased Henry Sparrow. He wanted her for a life com-
panion and, having their license that was issued April 26,
1790, they were, on April 3, 1791, married by the Baptist
preacher, the Reverend John Bailey. Lucy Hanks Sparrow
proved herself a woman of strengths and vitality, of passion
for life and brave living. Of her eight children that came she
saw to it in those days of little schooling that all of them
learned to read and write, and two became preachers of
reputation.

June 12, 1806, came and the home of Richard Berry at
Beechland in Washington County saw men and women on
horseback arriving for the wedding of 28-year-old Thomas
Lincoln and 22-year-old Nancy Hanks. The groom was
wearing his fancy beaver hat, a new black suit, his new silk
suspenders. The bride's outfit had in it linen and silk, per-
haps a dash somewhere of the "one-fourth yard of scarlet
cloth" Tom had bought at Bleakley & Montgomery's. They
had many relatives and friends in Washington County and
the time was right to go to a wedding, what with spring
planting and corn plowing over and the hay harvest yet to
come. Nancy Hanks was at home in the big double log
cabin of the Berrys. She had done sewing there for Mrs.
Berry and it was Richard Berry who had joined Thomas Lin-
coln in signing the marriage bond, below his name writing
"garden," mining guardian. The six Negro slaves owned
by Richard Berry were busy getting ready the food and
"fixins" to follow the wedding ceremony. The Reverend
Jesse Head arrived on his gray mare. He was a man they
rhymed about:

His nose is long and his hair is red,
And he goes by the name of Jesse Head.

A hater of sin, he liked decency and good order and could
pause in a sermon to step from the pulpit and throw out a
disorderly mocker who had had a few drinks. The bride and

26 THE PRAIRIE YEARS %

groom stood up before him. He pronounced them man arM
wife and wrote for the county clerk that on June 12, 1806,
Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks had been joined together
in the holy estate of matrimony "agreeable to the rites and
ceremonies of the Methodist Episcopal Church."

Then came "the infare." One who was there remembered,
"We had bear meat, venison, wild turkey and ducks, eggs
wild and tame, maple sugar lumps tied on a string to bite
off for coffee or whisky, syrup in big gourds, peach and
honey, a sheep barbecued whole over coals of wood burned
in a pit, and covered with green boughs to keep the juices
in; and a race for the whisky bottle." Quite likely Henry
Sparrow and his wife, Lucy Hanks Sparrow, rode over from
Mercer County to join the wedding company. For them, as
fpr the bride and groom, the solemn event of the day had a
peculiar loveliness and Lucy could have a glad heart.

The new husband put his bride on a horse and they rode
away on the red clay road along the timber trails to Eliza-
bethtown to make a home in a cabin close to the county
courthouse. At Bleakley & Montgomery's, Tom bought a
half set of knives and forks, a half-dozen spoons, thread and
needles, three skeins of silk, three pounds of tobacco — the
silk for Nancy, the tobacco for himself. Tom worked as a
carpenter, made cabinets, door frames, window sash and an
occasional coffin. A child's coffin cost, three dollars, a
woman's six and a man's seven.

Tall, slender, dark-complexioned Nancy Hanks had hap-
piness that year of 1806. One summer day she had news for
her husband— a baby on the way! They rode out more often
perhaps to the Little Mount Baptist Church where they
were members and spoke prayers more often of hope for the
child to come. Perhaps an added dark zeal came in the brief
grace Thomas spoke at meals.

On February 10, 1807, the child came wellborn and they
named her Sarah. Nancy washed and nursed her baby, made
her wishes and prayers for the little one. It could be she was
sad with sorrows like dark stars in blue mist, with hopes
burned deep in her that beyond the everyday struggles, the
babble and gabble of today, there might be what her bright-
est dreams told her. She read their Bible. One who knew her

Wilderness Beginnings 27

well said she was "a ready reader." She was a believer and
knew— so much of what she believed was yonder — always
yonder. Every day came cooking, keeping the fire going,
scrubbing, washing, patching, with little time to think or
sing of the glory she believed in — always yonder.

She saw her husband in trouble in law courts. He took a
contract to hew timbers and help put up a new sawmill for
Denton Geoghegan, spent days of hard work on the job.
When Geoghegan wouldn't pay him, Tom filed suit and
won. Geoghegan then started two suits against Lincoln,
claiming the sawmill timbers were not hewn square and
true. Tom Lincoln won both suits.

When he bought his second farm, 348 Vi acres on the
South Fork of Nolin Creek, 18 miles southeast of Elizabeth-
town, he paid Isaac Bush $200 in cash and took on a small
obligation due to a former titleholder. This in 1808 made
Tom Lincoln owner of 586^s acres of land, along with
two lots in Elizabethtown and some livestock.

In May and the blossom-time of 1808, Tom and Nancy
with the baby moved from Elizabethtown to the farm of
George Brownfield, where Tom did carpenter and farm
work. Near their cabin wild crab-apple trees stood thick
and flourishing with riots of bloom and odor. And the
smell of wild crab^apple blossom^, and the low crying of all
wild things, came keen that summer to Nancy, Hanks. The
summer stars that year shook out pain and warning, strange
and bittersweet laughters, for Nancy Hanks.

The same year saw Tom Lincoln's family moved to his
land on the South Fork of Nolin Creek, about two and a
half miles from Hodgenville. He was trying to farm stub-
born ground and make a home in a cabin of logs he cut
from timber nearby. The floor was packed-down dirt. One
door, swung on leather hinges, let them in and out. One
small window gave a lookout on the weather, the rain or
snow, sun and trees, and the play of the rolling prairie and
low hills. A stick-clay chimney carried the fire smoke up
and away.

One morning in February 1809, Tom Lincoln came out
of his cabin to the road, stopped a neighbor and asked him
to tell "the granny woman," Aunt Peggy Walters, that

28 THE PRAIRIE YEARS %

Nancy would need help soon. On the morning of Februaff
12, a Sunday, the granny woman was at the cabin. And she
and Tom Lincoln and the moaning Nancy Hanks welcomed
into a world of battle and blood, of whispering dreams and
wistful dust, a new child, a boy.

A little later that morning Tom Lincoln threw extra wood
on the fire, an extra bearskin over the mother, and walked
two miles up the road to where the Sparrows, Tom and
Betsy, lived. Dennis Hanks, the nine-year-old boy adopted
by the Sparrows, met Tom at the door. In his slow way of
talking Tom Lincoln told them, "Nancy's got a boy baby."
A half -sheepish look was in his eyes, as though maybe more
babies were not wanted in Kentucky just then.

Dennis Hanks took to his feet down the road to the Lin-
coln cabin. There he saw Nancy Hanks on a bed of poles
cleated to a corner of the cabin, under warm bearskins. She
turned her dark head from looking at the baby to look at
Dennis and threw him a tired, white smile from her mouth
and gray eyes. He stood watching the even, quiet breaths
of this fresh, soft red baby. "What you goin' to name him,
Nancy?" the boy asked. "Abraham," was the answer, "after
his grandfather."

Soon came Betsy Sparrow. She washed the baby, put a
yellow petticoat and a linsey shirt on him; cooked dried ber-
ries with wild honey for Nancy, put the one-room cabin in
better order, kissed Nancy and comforted her, and went
home, saying she would come again in the morning.

Dennis rolled up in a bearskin and slept by the fireplace
that night. He listened to the crying of the newborn child
once in the night and the feet of the father moving on the
dirt floor to help the mother and the little one. In the morn-
ing he took a long look at the baby and said to himself,
"Its skin looks just like red cherry pulp squeezed dry, in
wrinkles."

He asked if he could hold the baby. Nancy, as she passed
the little one into Dennis* arms, said, "Be keerful, Dennis,
fur you air the fust boy he's ever seen." Dennis swung the
baby back and forth, keeping up a chatter about how tickled
he was to have a new cousin to play with. The baby screwed
up its face and began crying with no letup. Dennis turned

Wilderness Beginnings 29

to Betsy Sparrow, handed her the baby and said, "Aunt,
take him! He'll never come to much."

Thus the birthday scene reported years later by Dennis
Hanks whose nimble mind sometimes invented more than
he saw or heard. Peggy Walters, too, years later, gave the
scene as her memory served: "I was twenty years old, then,
and helping to bring a baby into the world was more of an
event to me than it became afterward. But I was married
young, and had a baby of my own, and I had helped mother
who was quite famous as a granny woman. It was Saturday
afternoon when Tom Lincoln sent over and asked me to
come. They sent for Nancy's two aunts, Mis' Betsy Spar-
row and Mis' Polly Friend. I was there before them, and
we all had quite a spell to wait, and we got everything
ready. Nancy had a good feather-bed under her; it wasn't
a goose-feather bed, hardly anyone had that kind then, but
good hen feathers. And she had blankets enough. A little
girl there, two years old, Sarah, went to sleep before much
of anything happened.

"Nancy had about as hard a time as most women, I
reckon, easier than some and maybe harder than a few. The
baby was born just about sunup, on Sunday morning.
Nancy's two aunts took the baby and washed him and
dressed him, and I looked after Nancy. And I remember
after the baby was born, Tom came and stood beside the
bed and looked down at Nancy lying there, so pale and so
tired, and he stood there with that sort of hang-dog look
that a man has, sort of guilty like, but mighty proud, and
he says to me, 'Are you sure she's all right, Mis' Walters?'
And Nancy kind of stuck out her hand and reached for
his, and said, 'Yes, Toni, I'm all right' And then she said,
'You're glad it's a boy, Tom, aren't you? So am I.' "

Whatever the exact particulars, the definite event on that
12th of February, 1809, was the birth of a boy they named
Abraham after his grandfather who had been killed by In-
dians — born in silence and pain from a wilderness mother
on a bed of perhaps cornhusks and perhaps hen feathers—
with perhaps a laughing child prophecy later that he would
"never come to much."

30 THE PRAIRIE YEARS \

%

In the spring of 1811 Tom Lincoln moved his family ten\
miles northeast to a 230-acre farm he had bought on Knob
Creek, where the soil was a little richer and there were more
neighbors. The famous Cumberland Trail, the main pike
from Louisville to Nashville, ran nearby the new log cabin
Tom built, and they could see covered wagons with settlers
heading south, west, north, peddlers with tinware and no-
tions, gangs of slaves or "kaffles" moving on foot ahead of
an overseer or slave trader on horseback, and sometimes in
dandy carriages congressmen or legislative members going
to sessions at Louisville.

Here little Abe grew out of one shirt into another, learned
to walk and talk and as he grew bigger how to be a chore
boy, to run errands, carry water, fill the woodbox, clean
ashes from the fireplace. He learned the feel of blisters on
his hands from using a hoe handle on rows of beans,
onions, corn, potatoes. He ducked out of the way of the
heels of the stallion and two brood mares his father kept and
paid taxes on. That Knob Creek farm in their valley set
round by high hills and deep gorges was the first home Abe
Lincoln remembered. He told later how one Saturday after-
noon other boys planted the corn in what was called "the
big field*' of seven acres. "I dropped the pumpkin seed. I
dropped two seeds every other hill and every other row.
The next Sunday morning there came a big rain in the
hills, it did not rain a drop in the valley but the water com-
ing down through the gorges washed ground, corn, pumpkin
seeds and all clear off the field."

Again there were quiet and anxious days in 1812 when
another baby was on the way; again came neighbor helpers
and Nancy gave birth to her third child. They named him
Thomas but he died a few days after and Sarah and Abe
saw, in a coffin their father made, the little cold still face
and made their first acquaintance with the look of death in
a personal grief in their own one-room cabin.

Four miles a day Sarah and Abe walked when school
kept and they were not needed at home. In a log school-
house wit£ a dirt floor and one door, seated on puncheon
benches with no backs, they learned the alphabet A to Z

Wilderness Beginnings

and numbers one to ten. It was called a "blab school"; the
pupils before reciting read their lessons out loud to them-
selves to show they were busy studying. Their first teacher
was Zachariah Riney, a Catholic, and the second one, Caleb
Hazel, a former tavernkeeper. Under them young Abe
learned to write and to like forming letters and shaping
words. He said later that "anywhere and everywhere that
lines could be drawn, there he improved his capacity for
writing." He scrawled words with charcoal, he shaped them
♦in the dust, in sand, in snow. Writing had a fascination for
him.

Tom Lincoln worked hard and had a reputation for pay-
ing his debts. One year he was appointed a "road surveyor"
to keep a certain stretch of road in repair, another time was
named appraiser for an estate, and an 1814 tax book listed
him as 15th among the 98 property owners named. In 1816
he paid taxes on four horses. In 1814, however, because of
a flaw in title he sold his Mill Creek farm for 18 pounds less
than he had paid for it; the tract survey in one place read
"west" where it should have read "east." Another suit in-
volved his title to the Nolin Creek farm, still another aimed
to dispossess him of the Knob Creek farm. Meantime slav-
ery was on the rise and in 1816 there were 1,238 slaves on
the tax lists of Hardin County, one taxpayer owning 58
Negro slaves, men, women and children, on the books
valued along with horses, cows and other livestock. So when
Tom Lincoln in 1816 decided to move to Indiana it was, as
Abe later wrote, "partly on account of slavery; but chiefly
<on account of the difficulty in land titles."

In December 1816, Tom Lincoln with Nancy, Sarah,
Abe, four horses and their most needed household goods,
made their breakaway from Kentucky, moving north and
crossing the Ohio River into land then Perry County, later
Spencer County, Indiana. They traveled a wild raw country,
rolling land with trees everywhere, tall oaks and elms,
maples, birches, dogwood, underbrush tied down by ever-
winding grapevines, thin mist and winter damp rising from
the ground as Tom, with Abe perhaps helping, sometimes
went ahead with an ax and hacked out a trail. "It was a

32

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still iri%
the woods," Abe wrote later, where "the panther's scream,
filled night with fear" and "bears preyed on the swine." A
lonesome country, settlers few, "about one human being to
each square mile," families two and three miles apart.

They had toiled and hacked their way through wilderness
when about 16 miles from the Ohio River they came to a
rise of ground somewhat open near Little Pigeon Creek.
Here the whole family pitched in and threw together
a pole shed or "half-faced camp," at the open side a
log fire kept burning night and day. In the next weeks of
that winter Tom Lincoln, with help from neighbors and
young Abe, now nearly eight, erected a cabin 18 by 20 feet,
with a loft. Abe later wrote that he "though very young,
was large of his age, and had an axe put into his hands at
once; and was almost constantly handling that most useful
instrument." The chinking of wet clay and grass ("wattle
and daub") between the logs in the new cabin had not been
finished in early February when something happened that a
boy remembers after he is a grown man. Years later Abe
wrote, "At this place A.fbraham] took an early start as a
hunter, which was never much improved afterwards. A few
days before the completion of his eighth year, in the ab-
sence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the
new log-cabin, and A.[braham] with a rifle gun, standing
inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them." Then
came another sentence, "He has never since pulled a trigger
on any larger game," making it clear that when they had
deer or bear meat or other food from "larger game," it was
not from his shooting. He didn't like shooting to kill and
didn't care for a reputation as a hunter.

When Tom Lincoln built this cabin he didn't own the
land it stood on. He was a "squatter." Not until October 15,
1817, after a 90-mile overland trip to Vincennes did he
enter his claim for a quarter section of land, paying a first
installment of $16 then and in December $64. The Govern-
ment was selling him the land at $2.00 an acre; the $80 he
had paid was one-fourth of the purchase price and he would
have a clear title when he paid the ot^er three-fourths. It
had been a hard year, "pretty pinching times," as Abe put

J Wilderness Beginnings 33

i it later. They had to chop down trees, clear away under-
brush, on what few acres they planted after plowing the
hard unbroken sod. Their food was mostly game shot in
the woods nearby, deer, bear, wild turkeys, ducks, geese.
Wild pigeons in flocks sometimes darkened the sky. Their
cabin lighting at night was from fire logs, pine knots, or
hog fat. Sarah and Abe went barefoot from late spring till
autumn frosts, brought home nuts and wild fruits, watched
sometimes in the excitement of their father smoking out a
bee tree for the honey. One drawback ^as water supply.
Abe or Sarah had to walk nearly a mile to fetch spring
water. Tom dug several wells but they all went dry.

They were part of the American Frontier, many others
like them breaking ground never before broken, settling a
new midwest country. On wagons by thousands slipping
through the passes of the eastern mountains, or on flatboats,
scows and steamboats on the Ohio River, they were heading
west for the $2.00-an-acre Government land. Along pikes,
roads and trails heading west were broken wagon wheels
with grass growing up over the spokes and hubs, and
nearby perhaps a rusty skillet and the bones of horses and
men. They had stuck it out and lost. A saying, "The cow-
ards never started and the weak ones died by the way," was
unfair to the strong ones who died by the way of sudden
maladies or long rains, windstorms, howling blizzards.

Some of those who came were hungry, even lustful, for
land. Some were hunters, adventurers, outlaws, fugitives.
Most were hoping for a home of their own. In December
1816, when the Lincolns came to Pigeon Creek, enough
settlers had arrived in Indiana for it to be "admitted to the
Union." It could be about then little Abe asked the solemn
question, "The Union? What is the Union?"

A wagon one day late in 1817 brought into the Lincoln
clearing their good Kentucky neighbors Tom and Betsy
Sparrow and the odd quizzical 17-year-old Dennis Friend
Hanks. For some years Dennis would be a chum of Abe's
and on occasion would make free to say, "I am base born,"
explaining that his mother bore him before she married one
Levi Hall. The Sparrows were to live in the Lincoln pole
shed till they could locate land and settle. Hardly a year

I-

34 THE PRAIRIE YEARS i

\

had passed, however, when Tom and Betsy Sparrow were \
taken down with the "milk sick," beginning with a whitish
coat on the tongue, resulting, it was supposed, from cows
eating white snakeroot or other growths that poisoned their
milk. Tom and Betsy Sparrow died and were buried in Sep-
tember on a little hill in a clearing in the timbers nearby.

Soon after, there came* to Nancy Hanks Lincoln that
white coating of the tongue; her vitals burned; the tongue
turned brownish; her feet and hands grew cold and colder,
her pulse slow and slower. She knew she was dying, called
for her children, and spoke to them her last dim choking
words. Death came October 5, 1818, the banners of autumn
flaming their crimsons over tall oaks and quiet maples. On
a bed of poles cleated to the corner of the cabin, the body
of Nancy Hanks Lincoln lay in peace and silence, the eye-
lids closed down in unbroken rest. To the children who tip-
toed in, stood still, cried their tears of want and longing,
whispered and heard only their own whispers answering,
she looked as though new secrets had come to her in place
of the old secrets given up with the breath of life.

Tom Lincoln took a log left over from the building of the
cabin, and he and Dennis Hanks whipsawed it into planks,
planed the planks smooth, and made them of a measure for
a box to bury the dead wife and mother in. Little Abe, with
a jackknife, whittled pine-wood pegs. And while Dennis
and Abe held the planks, Tom bored holes and stuck the
whittled pegs through the holes. This was the coffin they
carried next day to the little timber clearing nearby, where
a few weeks before they had buried Tom and Betsy Spar-
row.

So Nancy Hanks Lincoln died, 34 years old, a pioneer
sacrifice, with memories of monotonous, endless everyday
chores, of mystic Bible verses read over and over for their
promises, of blue wistful hills and a summer when the crab-
apple blossoms flamed white and she carried a boy child
into the world.

A hard year followed with 12-year-old Sarah as house-
keeper and cook, and Tom Lincoln with the help of Dennis
and Abe trying to clear more land, plant it, and make the
farm a go. It was the year Abe was driving a horse at the

/ Wilderness Beginnings 35

mill. While he was putting a whiplash to the nag and call-
ing, "Git up, you old hussy; git up, you old hussy," the
horse let fly a fast hind foot that knocked Abe down and
out of his senses just as he yelled, "Git up." He lay bleed-
ing, wa& taken home, washed, put to bed, and lay all night
unconscious. He spoke of it afterward as a mystery of the
human mind, and later wrote of himself, "In his tenth year
he was kicked by a horse, and apparently killed for a time."
Instead of dying, as was half expected, he came to, saying,
"You old hussy," thus finishing what he started to say be-
fore he was knocked down and out.

Lonesome days came for Abe and Sarah in November
when their father went away, promising to come back. He
headed for Elizabethtown, Kentucky, through woods and
across the Ohio River, to the house of the widow Sarah
Bush Johnston. They said he argued straight-out: "I have
no wife and you no husband. I came a-purpose to marry
you. I knowed you from a gal and you knowed me from a
boy. I've no time to lose; and if you're willin' let it be done
straight off." She answered, "I got a few little debts," gave
him a list and he paid them; and they were married De-
cember 2, 1819.

He could write his name; she "made her mark." Why the
two of them took up with each other so quickly Dennis
Hanks later said, *Tom had a kind o' way with women, an'
maybe it was somethin' she took comfort in to have a man
that didn't drink an' cuss none."

Abe and Sarah had a nice surprise one morning when
four horses and a wagon came into their clearing, and their
father jumped off, then Sarah Bush Lincoln, the new wife
and mother, then her three children by her first husband,
Sarah Elizabeth (13), Matilda (10), and John D. Johnston
(9 years old). Next off the wagon came a feather mattress
and pillows, a black walnut bureau, a large clothes chest, a
table, chairs, pots and skillets, knives, forks, spoons.

"Here's your new mammy," his father told Abe as the
boy looked up at a strong, large-boned, rosy woman, with
a kindly face and eyes, a steady voice, steady ways. From
the first she was warm and friendly for Abe's hands to

36 THE PRAIRIE YEARS *

touch. And his hands roved with curiosity over a feather
pillow and a feather mattress.

The one-room cabin now sheltered eight people to feed
and clothe. At bedtime the men and boys undressed first,
the women and girls following, and by the code of decent
folk no one was abashed. Dennis and Abe climbed on pegs
to the loft for their sleep and liked it when later the logs
were chinked against the rain or snow coming in on them.
Dennis said "Aunt Sairy," the new mother, "had faculty
and didn't 'pear to be hurried or worried none," that she got
Tom to put in a floor and make "some good beds and
cheers." Abe, like Dennis, said "cheers"; if he said "chairs"
he would be taken as "uppety" and "too fine-haired."

In the earlier years he wore buckskin breeches and moc-
casins, a tow linen shirt and coonskin cap, "the way we all
dressed them days," said Dennis Hanks. For winter snow
and slush they had "birch bark, with hickory bark soles,
stropped on over yarn socks." And later, "when it got so
we could keep chickens, an' have salt pork an' corn dodgers,
an' gyardin saas an' molasses, an' have jeans pants an' cow-
hide boots to wear, we felt as if we was gittin' along in the
world."

Eleven-year-old Abe went to school again. Years later he
wrote of where he grew up, "There were some schools, so
called; but no qualification was ever required of a teacher,
beyond ( readin\ writin', and cipherin' * to the Rule of Three.
If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to so-
journ in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wiz-
ard." School kept at Pigeon Creek when a schoolmaster
happened to drift in, usually in winter, and school was out
when he drifted away. Andrew Crawford taught Abe in
1820, James Swaney two years later, and after a year of no
school Abe learned from Azel Dorsey. The schoolmasters
were paid by the parents in venison, hams, corn, animal
skins and other produce. Four miles from home to school
and four miles to home again Abe walked for his learning,
saying later that "all his schooling did not amount to one
year."

Abe kept his school sum book sheets as though they
might be worth reading again with such rhymes as:

Wilderness. Beginnings 37

Abraham Lincoln is my nam
And with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote in both hast and speed
and left it here for fools to read

Abraham Lincoln his hand and pen
he will be good but god knows When

Dennis Hanks made an ink of blackberry briar root and
copperas, an "ornery ink," he called it. And Abe with a
turkey-buzzard quill would write his name and say, "Denny,
look at that, will you? Abraham Lincoln! That stands fur
me. Don't look a blamed bit like me!" And, said Dennis,
"He'd stand and study it a spell. 'Peared to mean a heap to
Abe."

Having learned to read Abe read all the books he could
lay his hands on. Dennis, years later, tried to remember his
cousin's reading habits. "I never seen Abe after he was
twelve 'at he didn't have a book some'ers 'round. He'd put
a book inside his shirt an' fill his pants pockets with corn
dodgers, an' go off to plow or hoe. When noon come he'd
set down under a tree, an' read an' eat. In the house at
night, he'd tilt a cheer by the chimbly, an' set on his back-
bone an' read. I've seen a feller come in an' look at him,
Abe not knowin' anybody was round, an' sneak out agin
like a cat, an' say, 'Well, I'll be darned.' It didn't seem natu-
ral, nohow, to see a feller read like that. Aunt Sairy's never
let the children pester him. She always said Abe was goin*
to be a great man some day. An' she wasn't goin' to have
him hendered."

They heard Abe saying, "The things I want to know are
in books; my best friend is the man who'll git me a book I
ain't read." One fall afternoon he walked to see John
Pitcher, a lawyer at Rockport, nearly 20 miles away, and
borrowed a book he heard Pitcher had. A few days later,
with his father and Dennis and John Hanks he shucked
corn from early daylight till sundown. Then after supper
he read the book till midnight, and next day at noon hardly
knew the taste of his corn bread because of the book in
front of him. So they told it.

38

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

He read many hours in the family Bible, the only book in
their cabin. He borrowed and read Aesop's Fables, Pil-
grim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Grimshaw's History of
the United States, and Weems' The Life of George Wash-
ington, with Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honorable to
Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen. Books
lighted lamps in the dark rooms of his gloomy hours.

When John Hanks, a cousin of Nancy Hanks, came to
live with them about 1823, there were nine persons sleep-
ing, eating, washing, mending, dressing and undressing in
the one-room cabin, gathered close to the fireplace in zero
weather. John Hanks and Dennis, with some neighbors,
seemed to agree that while Abe wasn't "lazy" his mind was
often on books to the neglect of work. A neighbor woman
sized him up, "He could work when he wanted to, but he
was no hand to pitch in like killing snakes." John Romine
remarked, "Abe Lincoln worked for me . . . didn't love
work half as much as his pay. He said to me one day that
his father taught him to work, but he never taught him to
love it."

When rain soaked Weems' Life of Washington that
Josiah Crawford had loaned him, he confessed he had been
careless and pulled fodder three days to pay for the book,
made a clean sweep, till there wasn't an ear on a cornstalk
in the field of Josiah Crawford.

Farm boys in evenings at the store in Gentryville, a mile
and a half from the Lincoln cabin, talked about how Abe
Lincoln was always digging into books, picking a piece of
charcoal to write on the fire shovel, shaving off what he
wrote, and then writing more. Dennis Hanks said, "There's
suthin' peculiarsome about Abe." It seemed that Abe made
books tell him more than they told other people. Hie other
farm boys had gone to school and read The Kentucky Pre-
ceptor, but Abe picked out such a question as "Who has the
most right to complain, the Indian or the Negro?" and
would talk about it, up and down in the cornfields. When
he read in a book about a boat that came near a magnetic
rock, and how the magnets in the rock pulled all the nails
out of the boat so it went to pieces and the people in the
boat found themselves floundering in water, Abe thought it

Wilderness Beginnings 39

was interesting and told it to others. When he sat with the
girl, Kate Roby, with their bare feet in the creek, and she
spoke of the moon rising, he explained to her it was the
earth moving and not the moon — the moon only seemed to
rise. Kate was surprised at such knowledge.

The years pass and Abe Lincoln grows up, at 17 standing
six feet, nearly four inches, long-armed with rare strength
in his muscles. At 18 he could take an ax at the end of the
handle and hold it out from his shoulders in a straight hori-
zontal line, easy and steady. He could make his ax flash
and bite into a sugar maple or a sycamore, one neighbor
saying, "He can sink an ax deeper into wood than any man
I ever saw." He learned how suddenly life can spring a sur-
prise. One day in the woods, as he was sharpening a wedge
on a log, the ax glanced, nearly took his thumb off, and the
cut after healing left a white scar for life. "You never cuss
a good ax," was a saying then.

Sleep came deep to him after work outdoors, clearing
timberland for crops, cutting brush and burning it, splitting
rails, pulling crosscut saw and whipsaw, driving the shovel-
plow, harrowing, spading, planting, hoeing, cradling grain,
milking cows, helping neighbors at house-raisings, logroll-
ings, corn-huskings, hog killings. He found he was fast and
strong against other boys in sports. He earned board, clothes
and lodgings, sometimes, working for a neighbor farmer.

Often Abe worked alone in the timbers, daylong with
only the sound of his own ax, or his own voice speaking to
himself r or the crackling and swaying of branches in the
wind, or the cries and whirrs of animals, of brown and sil-
ver-gray squirrels, of partridges, hawks, crows, turkeys,
grouse, sparrows and the occasional wildcat. In wilderness
loneliness he companioned with trees, with the faces of
open sky and weather in changing seasons, with that indi-
vidual one-man instrument, the ax. Silence found him for
her own. In the making of him, the element of silence was
immense.

On a misunderstanding one time between Lincoln and
William Grigsby, Grigsby flared so mad he challenged Abe
to a fight. Abe looked at Grigsby, smiled and said the fight

40 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

X

ought to be with John D. Johnston, Abe's stepbrother. The
day was set, each man with his seconds. The two fighters,
stripped to the waist, mauled at each other with bare
knuckles. A crowd formed a ring and stood cheering, yell-
ing, hissing, and after a while saw Johnston getting the
worst of it. The ring of the crowd was broken when Abe
shouldered his way through, stepped out, took hold of
Grigsby and threw him out of the center of the fight ring.
Then, so they said, Abe Lincoln called out, "I'm the big
buck of this lick," and his eyes sweeping the circle of the
crowd he challenged, "If any of you want to try it, come on
and whet your horns." Wild fist-fighting came and for
months around the store in Gentryville they argued about
which gang whipped the other.

Asked by Farmer James Taylor if he could kill a hog,
Abe answered, "If you will risk the hog I'll risk myself." He
put barefoot boys to wading in a mud puddle near the horse
trough, picked them up one by one, carried them to the
house upside down, and walked their muddy feet across the
ceiling. The stepmother came in, laughed at the foot tracks,
told Abe he ought to be spanked — and he cleaned the ceil-
ing so it looked new.

Education came to the youth Abe by many ways outside
of schools and books. As he said later, he "picked up" edu-
cation. He was the letter writer for the family and for
neighbors. As he wrote he read the words out loud. He
asked questions, "What do you want to say in the letter?
How do you want to say it? Are you sure that's the best way
to say it? Or do you think we can fix up a better way to say
it?" This was a kind of training in grammar and English
composition.

He walked 30 miles to a courthouse to hear lawyers speak
and to see how they argued and acted. He heard roaring
and ranting political speakers — and mimicked them. He
listened to wandering evangelists who flung their arms and
tore the air with their voices — and mimicked them. He told
droll stories with his face screwed up in different ways. He
tried to read people as keenly as he read books. He drank
enough drams of whisky to learn he didn't like the taste
and it wasn't good for his mind or body. He smoked enough

Wilderness Beginnings 41

tobacco to learn he wouldn't care for it. He heard rollicking
and bsawdy verses and songs and kept some of them for
their earthy flavor and sometimes meaningful intentions.

His stepmother was a rich silent force in his life. The
family and the neighbors spoke of her sagacity and gump-
tion, her sewing and mending, how spick-and-span she kept
her house, her pots, pans and kettles. Her faith in God
shone in works more than words, and hard as life was, she
was thankful to be alive. She understood Abe's gloomy
spells better than anyone else and he named her as a deep
influence in him. "Abe never spoke a cross word to me,"
she said and she found him truthful. Matilda in a wild
prank hid and leaped out onto Abe's back to give him a
scare in a lonely timber. Pulling her hands against his shoul-
ders and pressing her knees against his back, she brought
him down to the ground. His ax blade cut her ankle and
strips from his shirt and her dress had to be torn to stop
the bleeding. By then she was sobbing over what to tell her
mother; on Abe's advice she told her mother the whole
truth.

When Abe's sister Sarah, a year after marrying Aaron
Grigsby, died in childbirth in 1828, it was Sarah Bush Lin-
coln who spoke comfort to the nearly 19-year-old son of
Nancy Hanks at the burial of his sister. Yet somehow the
stepmother couldn't lessen the bitterness Abe held toward
Aaron Grigsby, whether he blamed Grigsby for neglect of
his sister or something else. Two brothers of Aaron, Reu-
ben and Charles Grigsby, on the same day were marrying
Betsy Ray and Matilda Hawkins and purposely forgot to
invite Abe to the double wedding. It was then he put into
circulation a piece of writing titled "The Chronicles of
Reuben," which had many in the neighborhood tittering if
not laughing out loud at the Grigsbys. It told of what a
sumptuous affair it was, with music of harps, viols, rams'
horns, and "acclamations" at the wedding feast. "Finally
. . . the waiters took the two brides upstairs, placing one in
a bed at the right hand of the stairs and the other on the
left. The waiters came down, and Nancy the mother then
gave directions to the waiters of tjie bridegrooms, and tjiey
took them upstairs but placed them in the wrong beds. The

42

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

waiters then all came downstairs. But the mother, being
fearful of a mistake, made inquiry of the waiters, and learn-
ing the true facts took the light and sprang upstairs. It came
to pass she ran to one of the beds and exclaimed, 'O Lord,
Reuben, you are in bed with the wrong wife.' The young
men, both alarmed at this, sprang out of bed and ran with
such violence against each other they cam& near knocking
each other down. The tumult gave evidence to those below
that the mistake was certain. At last they all came down
and had a long conversation about who made the mistake,
but it could not be decided. So endeth the chapter."

A mile across the fields from the Lincoln home was the
Pigeon Creek Baptist Church, a log meetinghouse put up in
1822. On June 7, 1823, William Barker, who kept the min-
utes and records, wrote that the church "received Brother
Thomas Lincoln by letter." He was elected the next year
with two neighbors to serve as a committee of visitors to the
Gilead church, and served three years as church trustee.
Strict watch was kept on the conduct of members and Tom
served on committees to look into reported misconduct be-
tween husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, of neighbor
against neighbor.

Most of the church people could read only the shortest
words in the Bible, or none at all. They sat in the log meet-
inghouse on the split-log benches their own axes had
shaped, listening to the preacher reading from the Bible.

To confess, to work hard, to be saving, to be decent, were
the actions most praised and pleaded for in the sermons of
the preachers. Next to denying Christ, the worst sins amorjg
the men were drinking, gambling, fighting, loafing, and
among the women, gossiping, backbiting, sloth and slack
habits. A place named Hell where men, women and chil-
dren burned everlastingly in fires was the place where sin-
ners would go.

In a timber grove one summer Sunday afternoon, a
preacher yelled, shrieked, wrung his hands in sobs of hys-
terics, until a row of women were laid out to rest and re-
cover in the shade of an oak tree, after they had moaned,
shaken, danced up and down, worn themselves out with

Wilderness Beginnings 43

"the jerks*' and fainted. And young Abe Lincoln, looking
on, with sober face and quiet heart, was thoughtful about
what he saw before his eyes.

Some families had prayers in the morning on arising,
grace at breakfast, noon prayers and grace at dinner, grace
at supper and evening prayers at bedtime. In those house-
holds, the manger at Bethlehem was a white miracle, the
black Friday at Golgotha and the rocks rolled away for the
resurrection were nearby realities of terror and comfort,
dark power and sustenance. The Sabbath day, Christmas,
Easter, were days for sober thoughts and sober faces, resig-
nation, contemplation, rest, silence.

Beyond Indiana was something else; beyond the timber
and underbrush, the malaria, milk sick, blood, sweat, tears,
hands hard and crooked as the roots of walnut trees, there
must be something else.

After a day of plowing corn, watching crop pests, whit-
tling bean poles, capturing strayed cattle and fixing up a
hole in a snake-rail fence, while the housewife made a kettle
of soap, hoed the radishes and cabbages, milked the cows,
and washed the baby, there was a consolation leading to
easy slumber in the beatitudes: "Blessed are the meek: for
they shall inherit the earth . . . Blessed are the peacemakers:
for they shall be called the children of God." It was not
their business to be sure of the arguments and the invincible
logic that might underlie the Bible promises of Heaven
and threats of Hell; it was for this the preacher was hired
and paid by the corn, wheat, whisky, pork, linen, wool and
other produce brought by the members of the church.

The Sabbath was not only a day for religious meetings.
After the sermon, the members, who rode horses many
miles to the meetinghouse, talked about crops, weather,
births and deaths, the growing settlements, letters just come,
politics, Indians and land titles.

Young Abraham Lincoln saw certain of these Christians
with a clean burning fire, with inner reckonings that
prompted them to^silence or action or speech, and they
could justify themselves with a simple and final explanation
that all things should be done decently and in order. Th&r
door strings were out to sinners deep in mire, to scorners

44

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

seemingly past all redemption; the Jesus who lived with law-
breakers, thieves, lepers crying "Unclean!" was an instru-
ment and a light vivifying into everyday use the abstrac-
tions behind the words "malice," "mercy," "charity."

They met understanding from the solemn young Lincoln
who had refused to join his schoolmates in putting fire on
a live mud turtle, and had written a paper arguing against
cruelty to animals; who would bother to lug on his shoul-
ders and save from freezing a man overloaded with whisky;
who would get up before daylight and cross the fields to
listen to the weird disconnected babbling of the young man,
Matthew Gentry.

The footsteps of death, silent as the moving sundial of a
tall sycamore, were a presence. Time and death, the part-
ners who operate leaving no more track than mist, had to be
reckoned in the scheme of life. A day is a shooting star.
The young Lincoln had copied a rhyme:

Time! what an empty vapor 'tis!

And days how swift they are:
Swift as an Indian arrow —

Fly on like a shooting star,
The present moment just is here,

Then slides away in haste,
That we can never say they're ours,

But only say they're past.

His mother Nancy Hanks and her baby that didn't live,
his sister Sarah and her baby that didn't live — time and
the empty vapor had taken them; the rain and the snow
beat on their graves. Matthew Gentry, son of the richest
man in that part of Indiana, was in his right mind and then
began babbling week in and week out the droolings of a
disordered brain — time had done it without warning. On
both man and the animals, time and death had their way.
In a single week, the milk sick had taken four milk cows
and 11 calves of Dennis Hanks, while Dennis too had
nearly gone under.

At the Pigeon Creek settlement, while the structure of his
bones, the build and hang of his torso and limbs, took

Wilderness Beginnings

45

shape, other elements, invisible yet permanent, traced their
lines in the tissues of his head and heart.

Young Abraham had worked as a farm hand and ferry
helper for James Taylor, who lived at the mouth of Ander-
son Creek and operated a ferry across the Ohio River. Here
Abe saw steambqats, strings of flatboats loaded with farm
produce, other boats with cargoes from manufacturing cen-
ters. Houseboats, arks, sleds, flatboats with small cabins in
which families lived and kept house, floated toward their
new homesteads; on some were women washing, children
playing. Here was the life flow of a main artery of Ameri-
can civilization, at a vivid time of growth. Here at 18 Abe
built a scow and was taking passengers from Bates Landing
to steamboats in midstream. Two travelers anxious to get
on a steamer came one day and he sculled them out and
lifted their trunks on board. Each threw him a silver half-
dollar. It gave him a new feeling; the most he had ever
earned was 31 cents a day. And when one of the half-
dollars slipped from him and sank in the river, that too gave
him a new feeling.

One day, at a signal from the Kentucky shore, Lincoln
rowed across. Two men jumped out of the brush and said
they were going to "duck" him in the river. But looking him
over more closely, they changed their minds. They were
John and Lin Dill, brothers operating a ferry. All three
went to Justice of the Peace Samuel Pate, near Lewisport,
where John T. Dill swore out a warrant for the arrest of
Abraham Lincoln, charged, on trial, with running a ferry
without a license, in violation of Kentucky law. Lincoln
testified he had carried passengers from the Indiana shore
only to the middle of the river, never to the Kentucky
shore. Squire Pate dismissed the warrant against Lincoln;
the Dills went away sore, and Lincoln had a long talk with
Squire Pate and made a friend. Afterward on days when no
passengers were in sight he sometimes sculled over and
watched Squire Pate on "law day" handle cases.

James Gentry, with the largest farms in the Pigeon Creek
clearings, and a landing on the Ohio River, had looked Lin-

46

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

coin over. He believed Abe could take a cargo of produce
down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Abe built a flatboat,
cut oaks for a double bottom of stout planks, and a deck
shelter, two pairs of long oars at bow and stern, a check
post, and a setting pole for steering. In charge of the boat
Mr. Gentry had placed his son Allen, the 19-year-old Lin-
coln, "a hired hand," as he called himself. They loaded the
boat and pushed off for a thousand-mile trip on the wide,
winding waterway, where flatboats were tied up at night to
the riverbank, and floated and poled by day amid changing
currents, strings of other flatboats, and in the paths of the
proud white steamboats. The river bends ahead must be
watched with ready oars and sweeps or the flatboat heads
in to shore. Strong winds crook the course of the boat,
sometimes blowing it ashore; one man must hustle off in a
rowboat, tie a hawser to a tree or stump, while another man
on the boat has a rope at the check post; and they slow
her down. Warning signals must be given to other craft at
night, by waving lantern or firewood. So the flatboat, the
"broadhorn," went down the Father of Waters, four to six
miles an hour, the crew frying their own pork and corn-
meal cakes, washing their own shirts.

Below Baton Rouge, on the "Sugar Coast," they tied up
at the plantation of Madame Duchesne one evening, put^
their boat in order, and dropped off to sleep. They woke to
find seven Negroes on board trying to steal the cargo and
kill the crew; the swift and long-armed Lincoln swung a
crab-tree club, knocked some into the river, and with Allen
Gentry chased others into the woods, both coming back to
the boat bleeding. Lincoln laid a bandanna on a gash over
his right eye that left a scar for life as it healed. Then they
cut loose the boat and moved down the river.

At New Orleans they sold their cargo and flatboat and
lingered a few days. For the first time young Lincoln saw
a city of 40,000 people, a metropolis, a world port, with
seagoing ships taking on cotton, sugar, tobacco and food-
stuffs for Europe, a levee and wharves thick with planters,
clerks, longshoremen and roustabouts loading and unload-
ing cargoes. Sailors and deck hands from many nations and
great world ports walked and straggled along, talking,

Wilderness Beginnings 47

shouting, roistering, their languages a fascinating jabber to
the youths from Indiana. British, Yankee and French faces,
Spanish, Mexican, Creole, the occasional free Negro and
the frequent slave were on the streets. Gangs of chained
slaves passed, headed for cotton plantations of a thousand
and more acres. Women wearing bright slippers and flashy
gowns; Creoles with dusks of eyes; quadroons and octo-
roons with soft elusive voices, streets lined with saloons
and dens where men drank with men or chose from the
women sipping their French wines or Jamaica rum at tables,
sending signals with their eyes or fingers or openly slanging
the sailors, rivermen, timber cruisers, and no lack of gam-
blers with dice or cards. An old city that had floated the
flags of France and Britain and now of America. Here was
a great and famous cathedral, here mansions of extravagant
cost and upkeep, narrow streets with quaint iron grillwork
fronting the second stories, live oaks drooping with Spanish
moss, and many blocks of huts and hovels. The city had a
feel of old times and customs, of mossy traditions, none of
the raw and new as seen in Indiana.

Lincoln and Allen Gentry, heading for home after three
months, rode an elegant steamboat up the Mississippi, the
fare paM by James Gentry. Abe's wages at $8.00 a month,
or what he hadn't spent out of $24, he paid over to his
father, according to law and custom.

After a thousand miles of excitement and new sights
every day, he worked a while in James Gentry's store in
1829. Then came a new excitement — Tom Lincoln was
moving his family and kinfolk to Illinois where John Hanks
had gone. A new outbreak of the milk sick had brought a
neighborhood scare. Tom's farm wasn't paying well and
John Hanks was writing letters about rich land and better
crops. After buying 80 acres for $2.00 an acre and improv-
ing it 14 years, Tom sold the land to Charles Grigsby for
$125 cash. Moving came natural to Tom; he could tell
about the family that had moved so often their chickens
knew the signs of another moving; the chickens would
walk up to the mover, stretch flat on the ground, and put
their feet up to be tied for the next wagon trip.

48

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Tom and Sarah Lincoln on December 12, 1829, had
been granted by the Pigeon Creek Baptist Church a "letter
of Dismission" showing they were regular members in good
standing, this for use in Illinois. Sister Nancy Grigsby pro-
tested she was "not satisfied with Brother and Sister Lin-
coln." The trustees took back the "letter of Dismission" but
after investigation turned it back to Brother and Sister
Lincoln and appointed Brother Lincoln on a committee to
straighten out a squabble between Sister Nancy Grigsby
and Sister Betsy Crawford, details of which went into the
church records.

They made wagons that winter, of wood all through,
pegs, cleats, hickory withes, knots of bark holding some
parts together, though the wheel rims were iron. They
loaded bedclothes, skillets, ovens, furniture on three wag-
ons, ready to go early morning of March 1, 1830. Abra-
ham Lincoln had been for some days a citizen who "had
reached his majority"; he could vote at elections, was law-
fully free from paying his wages to his father; he could
come and go now; he was footloose.

Two of the wagons had two yoke of oxen each and one
wagon had four horses. On the wagons were Tom and Sarah
Bush Lincoln, her three children, John D. Johnston; Sarah,
with her husband Dennis Hanks and their daughters Sarah
Jane, Nancy M. and Harriet, and son John Talbot; Matilda,
with her husband Squire Hall and their son John; and Abra-
ham Lincoln on and off an ox wagon with a goad coaxing
or prodding the animals and bawling at them to get along.
They stopped where night found them, cooked supper,
slept, and started at daybreak. What with the ground
freezing at night and thawing in the day, the oxen and
horses slipped and tugged, the wagon axles groaned, the
wooden pegs and cleats squeaked — a journey, Lincoln said
later, "slow and tiresome." They forded rivers and creeks,
often breaking their way through ice; at one river, Lincoln
was reported telling it, "My little dog jumped out of the
wagon and the ice being thin he broke through and was
struggling for life. I could not bear to lose my dog, and I
jumped out of the wagon and waded waist deep in the ice

Wilderness Beginnings 49

and water, got hold of him and helped him out and saved
him."

At the first stretch of the Grand Prairie they saw long
levels of land running, with no slopes or hollows, straight to
the horizon. Grass stood up six and eight feet high with
roots so tough and deep that trees couldn't get rootholds.
They met settlers saying the tough sod had broken many
plows, but after the first year of seed corn the yield would
run 50 bushels to the acre, wheat averaging 25 to 30 bush-
els, oats 40 to 60 bushels.

After traveling over 200 miles to Macon County, Illinois,
they found John Hanks, who showed them the location he
had picked for them on the north bank of the Sangamon
River, about ten miles southwest of Decatur, land joining
timber and prairie. John Hanks had already cut the logs
for their cabin which soon was finished. They built a smoke-
house and barn, cleared some 15 acres, split rails to fence
it, planted corn, after which Abraham with John Hanks
split 3,000 rails for two neighbors, and as "sodbusters"
broke 30 acres of virgin prairie for John Hanks' brother
Charles.

It was a change from the monotony of hard farm work
in that summer of 1830 for Abraham to make his first po-
litical speech in Illinois. He had been delivering speeches
to trees, stumps, rows of corn and potatoes, just practicing,
by himself. But when two legislative candidates spoke at a
campaign meeting in front of Renshaw's store in Decatur,
Abraham stepped up and advocated improvement of the
Sangamon River for better navigation.

Fall came and most of the Lincoln family went down
with chills, fever and ague, Tom and Sarah using many
doses of a quinine and whisky tonic mixture from a Deca-
tur store. Then in December a blizzard filled the sky and
piled snow two and a half feet on the ground. Soon another
drive of snow made a four-foot depth of it on the level, with
high drifts here and there. Rain followed, froze, and more
snow covered the icy crust. Wolves took their way with deer
and cattle who broke through the crust and stood helpless.
Fodder crops went to ruin; cows, hogs and horses died in

50 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

the fields. Connections between houses, settlements, grain
mills, broke down; for days in 12-below-zero weather, fam-
ilies were cut off, living on parched corn. Some died of
cold, lacking wood to burn; some died of hunger, lacking
corn. Those who came through alive, in after years called
themselves "Snowbirds." Families like the Lincolns, with
little meat, corn and wood laid by, had it hard. Abraham
in February made a try at reaching the William Warnick
house, and crossing the Sangamon River broke through the,
ice and got his feet wet. Going on the two miles to the
Warnick house, he nearly froze his feet. Mrs. Warnick put
his feet in snow to take out the frostbite, then rubbed them
with grease. For nine weeks that snow cover held the
ground. Spring thaws came and sheets of water spread in
wide miles on the prairies.

As the roads became passable, the Lincoln family and
kin moved southeast a hundred miles to Coles County.
Abraham had other plans and didn't go with them. He had
"come of age."

Chapter 2

New Salem Days

In February 1831, John Hanks had made an agreement
with a man named Denton Offutt, a frontier hustler big
with promises and a hard drinker, that he, Abe Lincoln
and John D. Johnston would take a flatboat of cargo to
New Orleans. Offutt was to have the flatboat and cargo
ready and they were to meet him on the Sangamon River
near the village of Springfield as soon as the snow should
go off. With traveling by land made difficult by floods, they
bought a large canoe. And so, with his mother's cousin and
his stepbrother, in the spring of 1831, Abraham Lincoln,
22 years old, floated down the Sangamon River, going to a
new home, laughter and youth in his bones, in his heart a

New Salem Days 51

few pennies of dreams, in his head a rag bag of thoughts he
could never expect to sell.

Leaving their canoe at Judy's Ferry and not finding Den-
ton Offutt there, they walked to Springfield and at Andrew
Elliott's Buckhorn Tavern found Offutt lush with liquor
and promises and no flatboat. He hired them at $12 a
month and sent them to Government timberland, where
they cut down trees, got logs to Kirkpatrick's mill for
planks and gunwales. Near their shanty and camp on the
Sangamon River where the flatboat was shaping, the
Sangamon County assessor, Erastus Wright, saw Lincoln
in April with his "boots off, hat, coat and vest off. Pants
rolled up to his knees and shirt wet with sweat and comb-
ing his fuzzie hair with his fingers as he pounded away on
the boat."

In about four weeks they launched the boat, 80 feet long
and 18 feet wide, loaded the cargo of barreled pork, corn
and live hogs, and moved downstream from Sangamo
Town, steering away from snags and low water, Lincoln
on deck in blue homespun jeans, jacket, vest, rawhide boots
with pantaloons stuffed in, and a felt hat once black but
now, as the owner said, "sunburned till it was a combine of
colors." On April 19, rounding the curve of the Sangamon
at New Salem, the boat stuck on the Camron milldam, and
hung with one-third of her slanted downward over the edge
of the dam and filling slowly with water, while the cargo of
pork barrels was sliding slowly so ^s to overweight one end.
She hung there a day while all the people of New Salem
came down to look. Then they saw Lincoln getting part of
the cargo unloaded to the riverbank, boring a hole in the
flatboat end as it hung over the dam to let the water out,
plugging the hole, then dropping the boat over the dam and
reloading cargo. As she headed toward the Mississippi
water-course, New Salem talked about the cool head and
ready wit of the long-shanked young man.

Lincoln, Hanks and John D. Johnston floated down the
Mississippi River, meeting strings of flatboats and other
river craft. Hanks, away from home longer than expected,
left them at St. Louis. Stepping off the flatboat at New Or-
leans, Lincoln walked nearly a mile, on flatboats, to reach

52 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

shore. In New Orleans, Lincoln could read advertisements
of traders, one giving notice: "I will at all times pay the
highest cash prices for Negroes of every description, and
will also attend to the sale of Negroes on commission, hav-
ing a jail and yard fitted up expressly for boarding them."
There were sellers advertising, "For sale — several likely
girls from 10 to 18 years old, a woman 24, a very valuable
woman 25, with three very likely children," while buyers
indicated after the manner of one: "Wanted — I want to
purchase twenty-five likely Negroes, between the ages of
18 and 25 years, male and female, for which I will pay
the highest prices in cash."

Again Abraham could see the narrow cobblestoned
streets and the women with rouged faces and teasing voices
at the crib-house windows on side streets, Negroes shading
from black to octoroon, ragged poor whites, sailors drunk
and sober in a dozen different jargons, a dazzling parade
of the humanly ugly and lovely in a mingling — what his
eyes met again in the old strange city had him thoughtful
and brooding. After a month or so, with Johnston, he took
a steamboat north.

From New Orleans up the Mississippi on the steamboat
and from St. Louis walking overland Lincoln must have
wondered about New Salem village, the people there, his
new job, the new life he was moving into. Offutt had rented
the gristmill at the Sangamon River dam below the hilltop
village and in St. Louis was buying a stock of goods for a
new store. Lincoln was to be clerk in charge of store and
mill at $15 a month and back room to sleep in. Arriving
in late July Lincoln walked the village street, looked over
its dozen or more cabins, searched faces he expected to see
many times for many months.

On August 1, 1831, he cast his first ballot. The polls were
in the home of John Camron where Lincoln was boarding
and getting acquainted with Camron's 11 daughters who
teased him about his long legs and arms and heard him ad-
mit he "wasn't much to look at." Voting by word of mouth,
each voter spoke to the election judges his candidates'
names. A judge then called out the voter's name and his

New Salem Days 53

candidates, clerks recording the names "on poll sheets."
Lincoln voted for a Henry Clay Whig for Congress — and
against Joseph Duncan, then a Jackson man serving in Con-
gress. He stayed around the polls most of the day talking
cheerily, telling stories, making friends and getting ac-
quainted with the names and faces of nearly all the men
in the New Salem neighborhood.

The lizard story spun by the newcomer he said happened
in Indiana. In a meetinghouse deep in the tall timbers, a
preacher was delivering a sermon, wearing old-fashioned
baggy pantaloons fastened with one button and no sus-
penders, his shirt held at the collar by one button. In a
loud voice he announced his text, "I am the Christ, whom
I shall represent today." About then a little blue lizard ran
up under one pantaloon leg. The preacher went ahead with
his sermon, slapping his leg. After a while the lizard came
so high that the preacher was desperate, and, going on with
his sermon, unbuttoned the one button that held his panta-
loons; they dropped down and with a kick were off. By
this time the lizard had changed his route and circled
around under the shirt at the back, and the preacher, re-
peating his text, "I am the Christ, whom I shall represent
today," loosened his one collar button and with one sweep-
ing movement off came the shirt. The congregation sat
dazed, everything still for a minute; then a dignified elderly
lady stood up slowly and, pointing a finger toward the pul-
pit, called out at the top of her voice, "I just want to say
that if you represent Jesus Christ, sir, then I'm done with
the Bible."

A little later men were telling of Lincoln, Offutt and a
crew trying to load 30 large fat hogs onto a flatboat; the
hogs were slippery and stubborn and the crew couldn't
drive them on board. Offutt said, "Sew up their eyes,"
which was done, Lincoln helping, and writing it afterward,
"In their blind condition they could not be driven out of
the field they were in," so "they were tied and hauled on
carts to the boat."

Boarding in the John Camron house Lincoln could hear
at the eating table or in candlelight before bedtime how
young was the village, how it was built on hope and prom-

54

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

ise. It was only in January 1829 that Camron and his part-
ner James Rutledge had permission from the state legisla-
ture to build the dam that Lincoln had come to know so
well. They had a survey made the following October, named
the place New Salem, and in December that year they had
sold their first lot for $12.50; on Christmas Day 1829 they
had their post office in the new store of Samuel Hill and
John McNeil. The growing village soon had three general
stores, a cooper, two carpenters, a blacksmith and wagon-
maker, a tanner, a hatter, a shoemaker, two doctors, a
carding machine, two saloons, some 25 families and about
100 people, a squire and two constables living nearby. In
easy driving distance were settlements of two to four or
more houses along creek beds or in groves — Petersburg,
Sand Ridge, Sugar Grove, Irish Grove, Clary's Grove, In-
dian Point, Athens, their trading center New Salem.

Far up in northern Illinois was a young village named
Chicago, also built on hope ^nd promise, like New Salem
having about a dozen log cabins and a population of 100.
The wide stretch of prairie between New Salem and Chi-
cago was yet to have its tall grass and tough grass roots
broken for crops from rich black soil. In southern Illinois
the pioneers chose to farm where the sod was easier to
break and near timber for firewood, fences, logs for cabins.
These pioneers came mostly from Kentucky and Tennessee
and had yet to see what crops could be raised on treeless
prairies. A young and growing country and no one more
sure and proud of New Salem's future than Denton Offutt,
promoter, booster and boomer. He saw Lincoln as honest
and able, picked him as a manager, told people, "He knows
more than any man in the United States." Somehow at this
particular time Offutt had an influence on Lincoln for good,
perhaps made Lincoln feel more sure of himself. Lincoln
never joined those who later blamed and belittled Offutt.
There was something near tenderness in the way that, years
later, Lincoln wrote, "Offutt, previously an entire stranger,
conceived a liking for A.[braham] and believing he could
turn him to account."

While waiting for Offutt in August 1831, Lincoln navi-
gated a raft of household goods and a family, Texas bound,

New Salem Days 55

from New Salem to Beardstown and walked back to New
Salem, jingling good pay.

On a lot Offutt bought for $10, he and Lincoln built a
cabin of logs for the new store. Offutt's goods arrived and
Lincoln stacked shelves and corners. Soon stories got going
about Lincoln's honesty, how he walked six miles to pay
back a few cents a woman had overpaid for dry goods, and
finding he had used a four-ounce weight instead of an
eight, he walked miles to deliver to a woman the full order
of tea she, had paid for.

Offutt talked big about Lincoln as a wrestler and Bill
Clary, who ran a saloon 30 steps north of the Offutt store,
bet Offutt $10 that Lincoln couldn't throw Jack Armstrong,
the Clary's Grove champion. Sports from miles around
came to a level square next to Offutt's store to see the
match; bets of money, knives, trinkets, tobacco, drinks, were
put up. Armstrong, short and powerful, aimed from the first
to get in close to his man and use his thick muscular
strength. Lincoln held him off with long arms, wore down
his strength, got him out of breath, surprised and "rattled."
They pawed and clutched in many holds and twists till Lin-
coln threw Armstrong and had both shoulders to the grass.
Armstrong's gang started toward Lincoln with cries and
threats. Lincoln stepped to the Offutt store wall, braced
himself, and told the gang he would fight, race or wrestle
any who wanted to try him. Then Jack Armstrong broke
through the gang, shook Lincoln's hand, told them Lincoln
was "fair," and, "the best feller that ever broke into this
settlement."

Some claimed it was a draw, and that after a long round
of hard tussling and trying different holds, Lincoln said,
"Jack, let's quit. I can't throw you — you can't throw me."
One sure action everybody remembered was that Jack
Armstrong gave Lincoln a warm handshake and they were
close friends ever after. The Clary's Grove boys called on
him sometimes to judge their horse races and cockfights,
umpire their matches, and settle disputes. One story ran
that Lincoln was on hand one day when an old man had
agreed, for a gallon jug of whisky, to be rolled down a hill
in a barrel. And Lincoln talked and laughed them out of

56 , THE PRAIRIE YEARS

doing it. He wasn't there on the day, as D. G. Burner told
it, when the gang took an old man with a wooden leg, built
a fire around the wooden leg, and held the man down till
the wooden leg was burned off.

The Clary's Grove boys, it was told, had decided to see
what stuff Abe had in him. First, he was to run a foot race
with a man from Wolf. "Trot him out," said Abe. Second
he was to wrestle with a man from Little Grove. "All right,"
said Abe. Third, he must fight a man from Sand Ridge.
"Nothing wrong about that," said Abe. The foot racer from
Wolf couldn't pass Abe. The man from Little Grove, short
and heavy, stripped for action, ran at Abe like a battering-
ram. Abe stepped aside, caught his man by the nape of the
neck, threw him heels over head, and gave him a fall that
nearly broke the bones. A committee from the boys came
up and told him, "You have sand in your craw and we will
take you into our crowd." This, perhaps half true, was be-
ginning to be told by Henry Onstot and others.

When a small gambler tricked Bill Greene, Lincoln's
helper at the store, Lincoln told Bill to bet him the best fur
hat in the store that he [Lincoln] could lift a barrel of
whisky from the floor and hold it while he took a drink
from the bunghole. Bill hunted up the gambler and made
the bet. Lincoln sat squatting on the floor, lifted the barrel
off the floor, rolled it on his knees till the bunghole reached
his mouth, took a mouthful, let the barrel down — and stood
up and spat out the whisky. Bill won his bet. It was Bill
Greene who on the witness stand once, when a lawyer asked
him who were the principal citizens of New Salem, an-
swered, "There are no principal citizens; every man in New
Salem neighborhood is a principal citizen."

In spare hours Lincoln had sessions with Mentor
Graham, the local schoolmaster, who told him of a gram-
mar at John C. Vance's, six miles off; he walked the six
miles, brought back the book, burned pine shavings at night
in the Onstot cooper shop to light Samuel Kirkham's Eng-
lish Grammar. As he went further, he had Bill Greene
hold the book and ask him questions. In the New Salem De-
bating Society, Lincoln in his first speech opened in a tone
of apology, as though he wasn't sure of himself. He sur-

New Salem Days 57

prised both himself and those hearing him. James Rutledge,
president of the society, was saying there was "more than
wit and fun" in Abe's head.

In his work at the store, and in hours after work, he was
meeting people, characters, faces, voices and motives, close
up in a range and variety as never before in his life. James
Rutledge, 50 years old, of medium height, warmhearted,
square in dealings, religious, born in South Carolina, had
lived in Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, in White County,
Illinois, on Concord Creek seven miles north of New Salem.
The third of his nine children, Ann Mayes Rutledge was
18, had auburn hair, blue eyes, a fair face, and Lincoln
was to meet and know her. John M. Camron, Rutledge's
partner and ten years younger, was a nephew of Mrs. Rut-
ledge, had lived with or near them in White County 1 and
on Concord Creek. He was a massive, powerful man, had
learned the millwright's trade, had become an ordained
Cumberland Presbyterian minister, and sometimes preached
in and around New Salem.

Dr. John Allen, a graduate of Dartmouth College Medi-
cal School, had left Vermont and come west for the cli-
mate, arriving in New Salem the same month as Lincoln.
He was to prove himself a skilled physician and an earnest,
obstinate man in his steady, quiet arguments against Negro
slavery and alcoholic liquor. He went when called in all
kinds of weather, sent bills for his services only to the well
to do; all his fees from Sunday visits went into a fund for
the church, the sick, the poor. Here was a Yankee for Lin-
coln to study; he had in his days met few Yankees.

There was Henry Sinco, a saloonkeeper, and Lincoln's
vote August 1 had helped elect Sinco a village constable.
There was James Pantier, who hunted big game, owned
large tracts of land, wore a buckskin fringed shirt, some-
times had cured snake bites by rubbings and mumblings.
"Uncle Jimmy" would come in from Sand Ridge to a Cum-
berland Presbyterian Church meeting in a schoolhouse, re-
peat the sermon as the preacher spoke it, nod approval or
again shake a finger and in an undertone, "You are mis-
taken" or "Not so, brother."

Characters, men of personality and deed worth looking

58 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

at and studying, these pioneers. The father of Lincoln's
good friend, James Short, was pointed at as a veteran of
the Revolutionary War; he had become a wild turkey
hunter, and once in blazing away at 50, had killed 16 tur-
keys. Another veteran, Daddy Boger, of service under
George Washington, lived in Wolf, wove bushel baskets of
white oak splints, and would come to the village with a
basket nest under each arm, trade his baskets, rest a while,
and then start home. Lincoln definitely saw history in these
men; he had read about them.

Then there was Granny Spears of Clary's Grove, often
helping at houses where a new baby had come; stolen by
Indians when a girl and living with them she had learned
how to use herbs and make salves; a little dried-up woman
whose chin and nose curved out and nearly touched.
Farmer Sampson, with a big family, could tell of his beef
hides tanned by Philemon Morris, then taken to the cobbler
Alex Ferguson who had the foot measures of the family,
and, with a two-bushel sack, he was taking home a dozen
pairs of shoes. Tall, erect, an impressive figure was the Rev-
erend John M. Berry, an 1812 veteran, whose sermons
and prayers touched on the liquor evil with added depth be-
cause of his acquaintance with many a hard drinker. Sam-
uel Hill and John McNeil were the keenest traders in the
village, their store doing more business than any other. Hill
was hot-tempered, crafty, thrifty, often called stingy. Mc-
Neil's face and talk could puzzle people; what was going on
in his head and heart he didn't report.

Young Mr. Lincoln in late 1831 and early 1832 studied
a book of legal forms, signed as a witness to four deeds,
wrote in his own hand several legal documents, a bill of
sale and a bond, each beginning "Know all men by these
presents." With the help of his good friend, Bowling Green,
the justice of the peace, he was edging into law and how
to write the simpler documents.

On March 9, 1832, came the boldest and most important
paper he had ever written, telling the public he was stepping
into politics as a candidate for the legislature of the State
of Illinois. The Sangamo Journal at Springfield printed it
and it was issued as a handbill. There was in it the tone of

New Salem Days 59

a young man a little bashful about what he was doing —
and yet unafraid of his ideas and his platform, ready to de-
bate them with any comer. A railroad for the service of
New Salem would cost too high; her one hope was steam-
boat traffic; therefore he favored all possible improvement
of the Sangamon River; "if elected, any measure in the leg-
islature having this for its object, which may appear judi-
cious, will meet my approbation, and shall receive my sup-
port." He came out strong for education, books, religion,
morality. "That every man may receive at least, a moderate
education, and thereby be enabled to read th^ histories of
his own and other countries, by which he may duly appre-
ciate the value of our free institutions, appears to be an
object of vital importance, even on this account alone, to
say nothing of the advantages and satisfaction to be derived
from all being able to read the scriptures and other works,
both of a religious and moral nature, for themselves." Thus,
for the benefit of any who might have heard otherwise, the
young politician showed himself as favoring books, schools,
churches, the Scriptures, religion, morality.

Touching on "the practice of loaning money at exorbitant
rates of interest," it seemed to him as though "we are never
to have an end to this baneful and corroding system." He
mentioned "a direct tax of several thousand dollars annu-
ally laid on each county, for the benefit of a few individuals
only," which might require "a law made setting a limit to
the rates of usury." In his opinion such a law could be made
"without materially injuring any class of people." He men-
tioned no specific cases of usury or of "cheating the law"
but seemed to assume that his readers would know who and
what he was talking about in three curious sentences: "In
cases of extreme necessity, there could always be means
found to cheat the law, while in all other cases it would
have its intended effect. I would not favor . . . a law upon
this subject, which might be very easily evaded. Let it be
such that the labor and difficulty of evading it, could only
be justified in cases of the greatest necessity."

He was young and would admit "it is probable I have
already been more presuming than becomes me." What
was his ambition? "I have no other so great as that of being

60 THE PRAIRIE YEARS^

truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself wor-
thy of their esteem." He was throwing his case "exclusively
upon the independent voters of this county," making clear,
"I was born and have ever remained in the most humble
walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to rec-
ommend me." He closed in a manner having the gray glint
of his eyes and the loose hang of his long arms: "If the
good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the
background, I have been too familiar with disappointments
to be very much chagrined." That was all. He had made
his first real start in politics.

In this same March of 1832, excitement ran high in the
Sangamon country over the small, light-draft steamboat
Talisman with merchandise cargo from Cincinnati arriving
at Beardstown on the Illinois River, ready, when the ice
jams cleared, to make the trip upstream to New Salem and
Springfield. The shipmaster had asked for help; a boatload
of men, Lincoln one of them, worked with long-handled
poleaxes and crowbars clearing the channel of snags and
overhanging branches. The Talisman, puffing her smoke and
blowing her whistle, moved up the Sangamon; at New
Salem and other points she got cheers, laughter and waving
of hands from people seeing the first steamboat making
headway up that river, their river. Tying up at Portland
Landing, seven miles north of Springfield, the county seat
with a population of 500, merchants there advertised the
arrival of goods "direct from the East per steamer Talis-
man," and celebrated with a reception and dance in the
county courthouse. It was a matter aside that the shipmaster
had sent a dude captain, "a vainly dressed fellow," to com-
mand the boat and this deck officer had worried the ladies
of Springfield by bringing along a woman not his wife, both
of them drunk and loose-tongued at the festivities.

The trip of the Talisman downstream was "risky busi-
ness." The high waters of the spring thaw had gone down
making a more narrow river and shallow channel. At the
wheel, as pilot, the boat officers put Rowan Herndon, New
Salem grocer and a good boatsman, with Lincoln as assist-
ant pilot. To get past New Salem they had to tear down
part of the milldam. A slow four miles a day, sometimes

New Salem Days 61

nearly scraping river bottom, they made it to Beardstown.
Walking back to New Salem, the two pilots could jingle a
nice $40 apiece, their pay as navigators of the sometimes
unnavigable Sangamon.

One morning in April 1832 a rider got off his mud-spat-
tered, sweating horse in New Salem and gave notice of
Governor John Reynolds calling for 400 thirty-day volun-
teers from the Sangamon County state militia to report at
Beardstown April 24. The Illinois frontier, like nearly every
other state to the east, was to have an Indian war. The
67-year-old Black Hawk, war leader of the Sauk and Fox
tribes, on April 6 had crossed the Mississippi River into Illi-
nois, saying his people would plant corn along the Rock
River. He led 368 paint-faced and eagle-feathered warriors,
nearly 1,000 women and children, and 450 horses. So
came reports. For a hundred years his people had hunted,
fished and planted in that prairie valley until treaties with
the white men sent them west of the Mississippi. Now Black
Hawk claimed that "land can not be sold," that "nothing
can be sold but such things as can be carried away," and
that wrong was done when red men drank too deep of the
firewater of the white men and signed papers selling land.
In days soon to come his whooping night riders on fast
ponies left cabins in ashes and white men and women killed
and scalped. Also red men tumbled off their horses from the
rifle shots of white men. Any high cry in the night sent
white settlers to their cabins and rifles. It was held against
Black Hawk that in the War of 1812 he favored the Brit-
ish and fought as best he could for them.

Of this April, Lincoln said later, "Offutt's business was
failing — had almost failed — when the Black-Hawk war of
1832 broke out." For months it seemed the store was run
by Lincoln alone, while Offutt gave his time and funds to
big and risky speculations in buying and shipping produce,
leaving New Salem quietly in the spring of 1832 and not
being heard of for years.

Lincoln borrowed a horse and rode nine miles to Rich-
land Creek to join a company of friends and neighbors,
mostly Clary's Grove boys. Voting for a captain, each

62 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

man of the company stepped out and stood by either Lin-
coln or one William Kirkpatrick. Three-fourths of the men
at once went to Lincoln — and then one by one those stand-
ing by Kirkpatrick left him till he was almost alone. Lin-
coln was to write, years later, that he was "surprized" at
this election and had "not since had any success in life
which gave him so much satisfaction." He at once ap-
pointed Jack Armstrong first sergeant, and nine days later
promoted from the ranks his rival William Kirkpatrick.
They marched to Beardstown and went into camp, part of
an army of 1,600 mobilizing there.

To settle a dispute over which company should have a
certain campground, Lincoln wrestled with Lorenzo D.
Thompson. In their first feel-outs of each other, Lincoln
called, "Boys, this is the most powerful man I ever had hold
of." Lincoln was thrown twice and lost the match, saying
later of Thompson, "He could have thrown a grizzly bear."
After Lincoln went to the ground the second time, his men
swarmed in and from over their heads came Lincoln's
voice, "Boys, give up your bets. If this man hasn't thrown
me fairly, he could."

No easy set of men to drill into obeying orders had Lin-
coln, and his first military order was answered, "Go to
hell." He himself was a beginner in drill regulations, and
once couldn't think of the order that would get two pla-
toons endwise, two by two, for passing through a gate. So
he commanded, "This company is dismissed for two min-
utes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate."

At the brigade quartermaster's office April 25 Lincoln
drew corn, pork, salt, one barrel of flour and five and a half
gallons of whisky for his company. After five days there
was muttering and grumbling, discipline poor; it didn't seem
the kind of a war they had expected and they wrote home
about it. Lincoln's company was enrolled in the state serv-
ice April 28 and Lincoln drew 30 muskets and bayonets,
so it looked like there might be shooting. They began
marching, 25 miles one day, 20 miles another, one night
camping two miles from timber or water, men sleeping on
cold, damp ground. They arrived at Yellow Banks (later
Oquawka), noticed the citizens there serene and satisfied,

New Salem Days 63

some of the men wondering what the war was about. The
food wasn't good so some soldiers shot hogs and enjoyed
pork chops, and the farmers were heard from.

They marched to camp near the mouth ,of the Rock
River where on May 9 Lincoln's company, with others, was
sworn into the Federal service. The next day while the
U.S. Regular Army troops moved on boats, the 1,500 mi-
litia marched 26 miles in swamp muck and wilderness brush
along the left bank of the river, pushing and pulling when
horses and wagons bogged. When night rains came the tents
didn't shed water and Lincoln heard fagged men wail and
curse, along with talk of deserting.

They marched to Prophetstown, to Dixon's Ferry where
they heard two days later how, without orders, troops of
Major Isaiah Stillman had at dusk rushed at Indian horse-
men on a rise of ground about a mile from their camp,
bringing on a fight that ended in a rout and left 12 white
men dead. The next day General Samuel Whiteside's army,
including Lincoln's company, marched to the battle scene,
arriving near sunset to witness fallen white men who lay
scalped and mangled. The next day, after burials, the army
was drawn up in battle line for Black Hawk's spies to see
they were ready for action, after which the hungry troops
marched back to Dixon's Ferry and food and a speech by
Governor Reynolds promising militiamen who were eager
to go home that U.S. Regulars would arrive next day.

There were farmers anxious about their crops, there was
gloom over the stragglers routed and sent flying by Black
Hawk's horsemen, and a lessening confidence in officers.
Once, against orders, someone shot off a pistol inside the
camp; the authorities found it was Captain Lincoln; he was
arrested, his sword taken away, and he was held in custody
one day. Another time his men opened officers' supplies of
whisky; some were dead drunk and others straggled on
the march; a court-martial ordered Captain Lincoln to carry
a wooden sword two days. "A hard set of men," said a
Regular Army officer. Bill Greene remembered Lincoln
saying to officers of the U.S. Regulars that his men "must
be equal in all particulars" in rations and arms to the Regu-
lar Army and "resistance will hereafter be made to unjust

/

64 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

orders," which threat of mutiny resulted in better treatment.
Greene couldn't forget either how one day an old Indian,
with a safe-conduct pass from a general, rambled into
camp and men rushed to kill him. Lincoln jumped to the
side of the Indian and said with a hard gleam, "Men, this
must not be done." Some of the mob called him a coward
and his answer came like a shot, "Choose your weapons!"
Hot tempers cooled off as the Clary's Grove boys began
backing Lincoln and they saw he was a captain who didn't
presume on his authority.

They marched up Rock River, then to Stillman's battle-
field, then back along the Rock River, some men believing
they were being kept busy to lessen grumbling. On May 21
came news of an Indian party near Ottawa that killed, man-
gled and scalped three families, 15 persons, and took away
alive two girls of 17 and 15. They marched up Sycamore
Creek, arrived at Pottawatomie Village where spies the day
before had found a number of scalps. At this point mutiny
came, troops demanding discharge. Governor Reynolds
called a conference of captains, including Lincoln, and had
them vote on whether to follow the enemy or go home. A
tie vote was announced and General Whiteside's temper
blazed in saying he would no longer lead such men except
to be discharged. Four days later, after marching to Ottawa,
Lincoln's company and others were mustered out of the
service. Lincoln certified his muster roll, marking three
men as "absent without leave."

Lincoln re-enlisted for 20 days and May 29 was mustered
as a private into a company of mounted Independent Rang-
ers under Captain Elijah lies, a pioneer trader, land dealer,
and one of the founders of Springfield. His unit had former
colonels, captains, lieutenants, and one general serving as
privates. About this time Colonel Zachary Taylor of the
U.S. Regulars had ordered a company of militia to march
to Galena, and the men refusing to go, he had reported,
"The. more I see of the militia the less confidence I have of
their effecting anything of importance." Nevertheless Cap-
tain lies' company marched and camped alongside the small
Apple River Fort near Galena where the night before In-
dians had stolen 12 horses, and that afternoon had shot at

New Salem Days 65

and chased two men into the fort. The company slept with
guns in their arms. Arriving the next day in Galena they
found in the town of 400 so many people terrified that Cap-
tain lies believed they would put up little or no resistance
to Indians. Three days later the company again arrived at
Dixon's Ferry, lies reporting signs of Indians who seemed
more anxious to get horses than scalps. A 45-mile march
brought them to Fort Wilbourn on the Illinois River where
Captain lies' company was mustered out of service.

Lincoln on June 16 enlisted for the third time, becoming
a 30-day private in the Independent Spy Corps of Captain
Jacob M. Early, a Springfield physician and Methodist
preacher who had been a private in the companies of Lin-
coln and lies. On June 25 Early's Spy Corps was ordered
out on an all-night march to Kellogg's Grove where the
day before a main body of Sauks under Black Hawk, "se-
creted in a thicket," had surprised and routed the whites.
Lincoln shortly after sunrise helped bury five men. As he
told it afterward, each of the dead men "had a round, red
spot on top of his head, about as big as a dollar where the
redskins had taken his scalp." It was frightful, grotesque,
"and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over."
Captain Early wrote an extended report of the battle to
General Henry Atkinson of the Regular Army.

The Spy Corps made several marches and on July 1
crossed into Michigan Territory (later Wisconsin), camp-
ing and throwing up breastworks near, Turtle Village (later
Beloit) , sleeping on their muskets, Black Hawk being near.
Next day Early's men marched in advance of the army to
Lake Koshkonong and roundabout White Water and Burnt
Village, and for four days performed spy and scout duty for
General Atkinson's army of 450 Regulars, about 2,100
mounted volunteers, with 100 Indian allies. The general on
July 9 wrote to General Winfield Scott that the country was
so cut up with prairie, wood and swamp that it was "ex-
tremely difficult" to approach the enemy, many parts for
miles being "entirely impassable even on foot." He had de-
cided to dismiss the independent commands. On July 10
Captain Early's Spy Corps was mustered out at White
Water on Rock River, honorably discharged "with the spe-

66

THE PRAIRIE 'YEARS

eial thanks of Brigadier General KL Atkinson, Commander
in Chief of the Army of the Illinois Frontier."

Black Hawk shaped and reshaped his army as a shadow,
came and faded as a phantom, spread out false trails, set
traps, lures and used the ambush. Yet the white men,
though at cost, solved his style and used it to beat him. The
militia under General James D. Henry and other officers
proved themselves equal and at times superior to the Regu-
lars as they drove Black Hawk north, marching in storm
and night rains, performing an epic of endurance and valor,
outguessing the red men who had earlier tricked them. And
the end? Black Hawk, the prisoner, was taken to Washing-
ton, in the Executive Mansion facing President Jackson, the
red man saying to the white, "I — am — a man — and you —
are — another ... I took up the hatchet to avenge injuries
which could no longer be borne ... I say no more of it; all
is known to you."

On the night of his discharge Lincoln's horse was stolen;
so was that of his comrade George Harrison. In the 200
miles to Peoria they walked and part way rode on the horses
of comrades. Buying a canoe at Peoria, Lincoln and Har-
rison steered by turns to Havana, sold the canoe, then
walked to New Salem. An army paymaster six months
later in Springfield paid Lincoln some $95 for his 80 days
in the war. In those days Lincoln had seen deep into the
heart of the American volunteer soldier, why men go to
war, march in mud, sleep in rain on cold ground, eat pork
raw when it can't be boiled, and kill when the killing is
good. On a later day an observer was to say he saw Lin-
coln's eyes misty in his mention of the American volun-
teer soldier.

Election was 18 days off, on August 6, and Lincoln trav-
eled over Sangamon County, gave the arguments in his long
address issued in the spring. At Pappsville, where a crowd
had come to a sale, as he stepped on a box for his speech
he saw fellow citizens on the edge of the crowd in a fist
fight. He noticed his pilot friend Rowan Herndon getting
the worst of it, stepped off the box, shouldered his way to
the fight/picked a man by the scruff of the neck and the

New Salem Days 67

seat of the breeches, and threw him. Back on his box, he
swept the crowd with his eyes in a cool way as though what
had happened sort of happened every day, and then made a
speech. Campaigning among farmers, he pitched hay and
cradled wheat in the fields and showed the farmers he was
one of them; at crossroads he threw the crowbar and let
the local wrestlers try to get the "crotch hoist" on him. He
closed his campaign with a speech in the county courthouse
at Springfield. On Election Day Lincoln lost, running
eighth in a field of 13 candidates. But in his own New
Salem precinct, he polled 277 of the 300 votes cast.

Later Lincoln wrote of himself after this August election,
"He was now without means and out of business, but was
anxious to remain with his friends who had treated him
with so much generosity, especially as he had nothing else-
where to go to. He studied what he should do — thought
of learning the black-smith trade — thought, of trying to
study law — rather thought he could not succeed at that
without a better education."

He bought Rowan Herndon's interest in the partnership
of Herndon and William F. Berry, merchants, giving Hern-
don his promissory note. Then Berry and Lincoln bought
a stock of goods under peculiar conditions. Reuben Rad-
ford at his store had spoken threats to Clary's Grove boys
and one day went away from his store telling his younger
brother that if Clary's Grove boys came in they should
have two drinks apiece and no more. The boys came, took
their two drinks, stood the young clerk on his head, helped
themselves at jugs and barrels, wrecked the store, broke
the windows and rode away yelling on their ponies. Rad-
ford looked the wreck over and on the spot sold the stock to
William G. Greene. The price was $400 which Greene
made up by paying Radford $23 in cash and giving two
notes for $188.50 each, secured by a mortgage on a New
Salem lot. Lincoln drew and witnessed the mortgage, and
on the same day he and Berry bought the stock from
Greene, paying $265 cash, assuming Greene's notes to
Radford, and throwing in a horse to boot. Thus Greene
made a profit of $242 and one horse. Across later months
there was more financing, several lawsuits and court judg-

68

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

ments. They did nothing, as Lincoln said later, "but get
deeper and deeper in debt" and "the store winked out."

During the fall and winter of 1832, business didn't pick
up much. Berry wasn't interested, and Lincoln was reading
and dreaming. Early harvest days came; the farmers bun-
dled grain in russet fields. From the Salem hilltop the val-
ley of the Sangamon River loitered off in a long stretch
of lazy, dreamy haze and the harvest moon came in a wash
of pumpkin colors. Lincoln could sit with uninterrupted
thoughts, free day after day to turn and look into himself.
He was having days that might nourish by letting him sit
still and get at himself. He was growing as inevitably as
summer corn in Illinois loam. Leaning against the door-
post of a store to which few customers came he was grow-
ing, in silence, as corn grows. He had bought at an auction
in Springfield a copy of Blackstone, the first of the law
books to read. One morning he sat barefoot on a woodpile,
with a book. "What are you reading?" asked Squire Godbey.
"I ain't reading; I'm studying." "Studying what?" "Law."
"Good God Almighty!"

Lincoln later came across an account of "the peculiar
manner" of his law studies: "His favorite place of study
was a wooded knoll near New Salem, where he threw him-
self under a wide-spreading oak, and expansively made a
reading desk of the hillside. Here he would pore over
Blackstone day after day, shifting his position as the sun
rose and sank, so as to keep in the shade, and utterly un-
conscious of everything but the principles of common law.
People went by, and he took no account of them; the salu-
tations of acquaintances were returned with silence, or a
vacant stare; and altogether the manner of the absorbed
student was not unlike that of one distraught." This picture
of himself as a law student he accepted.

Business dropped off. Berry took out a license in March
1833 for Berry and Lincoln to keep a tavern and sell retail
liquors. The required bond had both names, Lincoln and
Berry, but neither signature was in Lincoln's well-known
handwriting. The license specified they could sell whisky
at 12Vfc cents a pint, brandies, gins, wine and rum, at vari-
ous prices.

New Salem Days 69

Selling pork, salt, powder, guns, trading calico prints and
bonnets for eggs and furs had only a mild interest for Lin-
coln, but taking the cash of men and boys for hard liquor
didn't come easy — and a few weeks after the firm got its
license, Lincoln, in a deal of some kind, turned his interest
in the store over to Berry. It could, however, have been
about this time that, as he later told it, "Lincoln did work
the latter part of one winter in a little still house, up at the
head of a hollow." The stills ran in many odd corners, the
supply endless, corn juice priced at $1.00 and less per gal-
lon. At gatherings, barbecues, dances, sporting events, auc-
tion sales, weddings, funerals, camp meetings, the jug
and the bottle were there. Dr. Allen, in his temperance ap-
peals, found his fiercest opponents "among church mem-
bers, most of whom had their barrels of whisky at home."
Even the hardshell Baptist church was not then ready to
take a stand against whisky. When Mentor Graham, the
schoolmaster, joined the temperance movement, the church
trustees suspended him. Then, to hold a balance, the trus-
tees suspended another member who had gone blind drunk.
This action puzzled one member who stood up in meeting
and, shaking a half-full quart bottle so all could see,
drawled, "Brethering, you have turned one member out
beca'se he would not drink, and another beca'se he got
drunk, and now I wants to ask a question. How much of
this 'ere critter does a man have to drink to remain in full
membership in this church?"

On May 7, 1833, as Lincoln told it, he "was appointed
Postmaster at New Salem — the office being too insignifi-
cant, to make his politics an objection." The pay would run
about $50 a year, in commissions on receipts. He had to
be in the office at Hill's store only long enough to receive
and receipt for the mail which came twice a week by post-
rider at first and later by stage. Letters arrived written on
sheets of paper folded and waxed, envelopes not yet in use.
The sender of a letter paid no postage; that fell on who-
ever the letter was addressed to. Postage on a one-sheet
letter was six cents for the first 30 miles, ten cents for 30
to 80 miles, and so on to 25 cents for more than 400 miles.
Two sheets cost twice as much, three sheets three times as

70

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

much, and with every letter Lincoln had to figure how
many sheets, how far it had come, then mark the postage
in the upper right corner of the outside sheet. If anyone
didn't like his figuring as to the number of sheets the re-
ceiver could open the letter before the postmaster and set-
tle the question.

Lincoln was free to read newspapers before delivering
them, and he read "the public prints" as never before. The
habit deepened in him of watching newspapers for politi-
cal trends and issues. And he could find excitement at times
in reading the speeches made in Congress at Washington
as reported in full in the Congressional Globe subscribed
for by John C. Vance. It was no pleasure for him to write
later to the publishers, Blair & Rives, "Your subscriber at
this place John C. Vance, is dead; and no person takes the
paper from the office." It seemed he wasn't strict about
regulations, and when George Spears sent a messenger with
postage money for his newspapers and a note telling Lin-
coln he wanted a receipt, Lincoln replied he was "surprised"
and, "the law requires News paper postage to be paid in
advance and now that I have waited a full year you choose
to wound my feeling by intimating that unless you get a
receipt I will probably make you pay it again."

At times the post office was left unlocked for hours while
citizens who called for mail helped themselves. The post-
master could send and receive letters free but franking a
letter for someone else made him liable to a $10 fine. Not
bothering about regulations, he wrote in the upper right
corner of an outside sheet: "Free. A. Lincoln, P.M. New
Salem Ills. Sept. 22." The letter was from Matthew S.
Marsh to a brother in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and
near its opening said: "The Post Master [Mr. Lincoln] is
very careless about leaving his office open & unlocked dur-
ing the day — half the time I go in & get my papers etc. with-
out any one being there as was the case yesterday. The let-
ter was only marked 25 & even if he had been there &
known it was double he would not [have] charged me any
more — luckily he is a very clever fellow & a particular
friend of mine. If he is there when I carry this to the office
—I will get him to 'Frank' it . . ." As between "particular"

New Salem Days 71

friends, could it have been that Marsh sometimes spoke to
Lincoln as he did to his folks in his letter? Did he tell Lin-
coln that if no better chance offered he would teach a pri-
vate school on Indian Creek, Morgan County, nearby a
"sucker girl" of whom he wrote: "She possesses more
qualities which assimilate with my peculiar disposition &
comes nearer to the standard of what I consider essential
in a wife than any girl I have ever seen. In stature middling
height & slim — Light brown hair, black eyes, which sup-
press half their fire until she speaks, then through their
soft disguise will flash an expression more of pride than
ire . . . Her age 20. Such is all the description I can give of
the girl who at present stands highest in my estimation. How
long she will continue to do so I canriot assure even myself
as I have naturally a fickle disposition ... I have one ob-
jection to marrying in this state & that is, the women have
such an everlasting number of children— twelve is the least
number that can be counted on." Did Marsh say the like to
young Lincoln, of whom some were saying, "He can pump
a man dry on any subject he is interested in"?

Marsh was good company, a man Lincoln could learn
from. So was Jack Kelso, blacksmith, fisherman, trapper,
a good rifle shot, a reader of Shakespeare and Burns. He
recited from those authors, Lincoln listening while Kelso
talked and fished, Lincoln joining in discussions but not in
the bottle Kelso usually had handy. It was said that when
other men were lush from drinking they wanted to fight
but Kelso would recite Shakespeare and Burns.

Lincoln signed as witness to petitions and deeds, signed
honorable discharges for members of his Black Hawk War
company, accepted when after the war he was elected cap-
tain of militia in Clary's Grove, drew and attested mort-
gages, served as clerk with $1.00 of pay at September and
November elections in New Salem, received $2.50 for tak-
ing poll books 18 miles to Springfield.

For earning a living, jobs at common labor were plenty;
he worked as rail splitter, mill hand, farm hand, helped out
at the Hill store. Meanwhile he read or dipped into Volney's
The Ruins of Empire, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Ro-
man Empire, Paine's The Age of Reason. And his debts

72

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

haunted him. They added up to more when his former part-
ner, William F. Berry, died on short notice in January
1835, his estate practically nothing, leaving Lincoln re-
sponsible for their joint obligations. Thus his debts ran to a
total of $1,100 — and they wouldn't laugh away. They were
little rats, a rat for every dollar, and he could hear them
in the night when he wanted to sleep.

Squire Bowling Green proved a friend and counselor,
explained to Lincoln what he knew of the Illinois statutes,
allowed Lincoln without fee to try small cases, examine
witnesses and make arguments. The squire, not yet 50,
weighed 250 pounds and was nicknamed "Pot" for his
paunch. He held court wearing only a shirt and pants and
once when two witnesses swore a hog didn't belong to
Jack Kelso and Kelso swore it did, Squire Green decided,
"The two witness we have heard have sworn to a damned
lie. I know this shoat, and I know he belongs to Jack Kelso."

In the fall of 1833 came Lincoln's entry into the most
highly technical and responsible work he had known. Writ-
ing of it later, he said, "The Surveyor of Sangamon
^County], offered to depute to Afbraham] that portion of
his work which was within his part of the county. He ac-
cepted, procured a compass and chain, studied Flint, and
Gibson a little, and went at it. This procured bread, and
kept soul and body together." There were farm sections,
roads and towns needing their boundary lines marked clear
and beyond doubt on maps — more than the county sur-
veyor, John Calhoun, could handle. On the suggestion of
Pollard Simmons, a farmer and Democratic politician liv-
ing near New Salem, Calhoun, a Jackson Democrat, * ap-
pointed Lincoln, who went 18 miles to Springfield to make
sure he wasn't tied up politically and could speak as he
pleased.

Then for six weeks, daytime and often all of nighttime,
he had his head deep in Gibson's Theory and Practice of
Surveying and Flint's Treatise on Geometry, Trigonome-
try and Rectangular Surveying, From decimal fractions one
book ran on into logarithms, the use of mathematical in-
struments, operating the chain, circumferentor, surveying

New Salem Days 73

by intersections, changing the scale of maps, leveling,
methods for mensuration of areas. Many nights, said Men-
tor Graham's daughter, she woke at midnight to see Lin-
coln and her father by the fire, figuring and explaining, her
mother sometimes bringing fresh firewood for better light-
ing. On some nights he worked alone till daylight and it
wore him down. He was fagged, and friends said he looked
like a hard drinker after a two weeks' spree. Good people
said, "You're killing yourself."

In six weeks, however, he had mastered his books, and
Calhoun put him to work on the north end of Sangamon
County. The open air and sun helped as he worked in
field and timberland with compass and measurements. His
pay was $2.50 for "establishing" a quarter section of land,
$2.00 for a half-quarter, 25 cents to 37V£ cents for small
town lots. He surveyed the towns of Petersburg, Bath, New
Boston, Albany, Huron, and others. He surveyed roads,
school sections, pieces of farm land from four-acre plots
to 160-acre farms. His surveys became known for care and
accuracy and he was called on to settle boundary disputes.
In Petersburg, however, he laid out one street crooked.
Running it straight and regular, it would have put the
house of Jemima Elmore and her family into the street.
Lincoln knew her to be working a small farm with her chil-
dren and she was the widow of Private Travice Elmore,
honorable in service in Lincoln's company in the Black
Hawk War.

For his surveying trips he had bought a horse, saddle
and bridle from William Watkins for $57.86, and for non-
payment Watkins on April 26, 1834, got judgment in court
and levied on Lincoln's personal possessions. It looked as
though he would lose his surveying instruments. Then Bill
Greene showed up and turned in a horse on the Watkins
judgment— and James Short came from Sand Ridge to the
auction Lincoln was too sad to attend and bid in the saddle,
bridle, compass and other surveying instruments. When
Short brought them to Lincoln it hit him as another surprise
in his young life. Short liked Lincoln as a serious student,
a pleasant joker, and said that on a farm "he husks two
loads of corn to my one."

74

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

In January 1834, after a survey for Russell Godbey, Lin-
coln bought two buckskins from Godbey and took them to
Hannah Armstrong, the wife of Jack, who "foxed his
pants," sewed leather between ankles and knees for pro-
tection against briars. The Armstrongs took him in two or
three weeks at a time when he needed a place to stay, Han-
nah saying, "Abe would drink milk, eat mush, corn-bread
and butter, rock the cradle while I got him something to
eat. I foxed his pants, made his shirts. He would tell stories,
joke people at parties. He would nurse babies — do anything
to accomodate anybody." Jack one day had a hand in an
affair that A. Y. Ellis said had Lincoln "out of temper and
laughing at the same time." The boys had made a large fire
of shavings and hemp stalks and bet a fellow Ellis called
Ike that he couldn't run his bobtail pony through the fire.
Ike got a hundred-yard start, came full tilt with his hat off,
and just as he reached the blazing fire his pony "flew the
track and pitched poor Ike into the flames." Lincoln ran
to help, crying, "You have carried this thing far enough."
He was mad though he couldn't help laughing, as Ellis saw
him. Jack took Ike with scorched head and face to a doc-
tor, who shaved the head and put salve on the burn. Jack
was sorry and at his house next morning gave Ike a dram,
his breakfast and a skin cap and sent him home.

Lincoln worked at occasional odd jobs when there was
no surveying but he made it a point to find time to keep up
his political connections. On March 1, 1834, he was sec-
retary of a public meeting at New Salem which resolved
on General James D. Henry, former sheriff of Sangamon
County, as their choice for governor. General Henry had
become a high name in the history of the Black Hawk War,
a proven strategist and a soldier of courage who shared
hardships with his men. He died of tuberculosis in New Or-
leans four days after the New Salem meeting that favored
him and Lincoln couldn't stay away from a memorial serv-
ice for Henry on April 20 in the courthouse at Springfield.

In those New Salem days were some saying Lincoln
would be a great man; maybe governor or senator, anyhow
a great lawyer, what with his studying of law. Others saw
him as an awkward, gangly giant, a homely joker who could

New Salem Days 75

go gloomy and show it. It was noticed he had two shifting
moods, one of the rollicking, droll story, one when he
lapsed silent and solemn beyond any bystander to penetrate.

He moved amid odd happenings. He mourned with oth-
ers when Rowan Herndon, while cleaning a rifle, acciden-
tally pressed the trigger, the bullet striking his wife in the
neck, bringing almost instant death. One winter morning he
saw young Ab Trent, chopping away at the logs of an old
pulled-down stable, Ab with rags instead of shoes on his
feet. He told Lincoln he was earning a dollar to buy shoes.
Lincoln told him to run to the store and warm his feet. And
after a while Lincoln came to the store, handed Ab Trent
his ax, and told him to collect the dollar and buy shoes;
the wood was chopped. Later Ab, a Democrat, told friends
he was going to vote for Lincoln for the legislature. And
when the poll books showed that Ab Trent had voted
against Lincoln, Ab came to Lincoln with tears in his eyes
and said his friends had got him drunk and had him vote
against the way he intended.

In late summer or early fall of 1834 many people in New
Salem, Lincoln included, wondered what had become of
John McNeil. It was two years since he had left New Salem.
Before leaving he had sold his interest in the Hill-McNeil
store to Hill, but at 32 he was the owner of farms steadily
rising in value and was rated one of the shrewdest and rich-
est traders in New Salem. In money and looks he was con-
sidered by girls "a good catch." On December 9, 1831, Lin-
coln with Charles Maltby witnessed two deeds given by
John Camron to John McNamar and it was then, if not
earlier, that Lincoln learned John McNeil's real name was
John McNamar. This also explained to Lincoln why as elec-
tion clerk he didn't see McNeil's name on the poll books;
the man was keeping his real name off election records. He
said that he had left his family in New York State rather
bad off and, setting out to make a fortune, he didn't want
his family to trace and interfere with him, but he would in
good time go back and help them when he had made his
money.

The one person most anxious about him when he went

76

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

away from New Salem in 1832 was, in all probability, the
19-year-old Ann Rutledge. They were engaged to marry
and it was understood he would straighten out affairs of
his family in New York State and in not too long a time
would come back to her for the marriage. He rode away
on a horse that had seen service in the Black Hawk War
and it was said that he wrote to Ann from Ohio of a serious
three weeks' sickness there and again had written her from
New York, and she had answered his letters — and that
was all.

A few months after he left in September 1832, James
Rutledge and John M. Camron, the two founders of New
Salem, having failed in business affairs, moved with their
families into the double-log house of a farm near Sand
Ridge that McNamar owned through payment to Camron
of $400. It could have been that McNamar was showing
goodness of heart to the family of his betrothed, at the
same time acquiring trusted and responsible caretakers of
his property while he was away. Possibly, too, he believed
Ann's feeling about him would have added assurance out
of her living on his land, the same land she might live on
after their marriage. McNamar was a careful and exact
man, insisted on clear understandings in all bargains — and
a betrothal to him was a bargain between a man and a
woman and their joint properties. What they wrote to each
other about motives and intentions was in letters not kept
and saved.

For nearly two years no one in New Salem had heard
from the man who was afraid his folks would find him and
had therefore changed his name. There was guessing and
byplay of the kind in a later frontier song:

Oh, what was your name in the States?
Was it Thompson or Johnson or Bates?

Did you murder your wife and fly for your life?

Say, what was your name in the States?

Sharp gossips asked, "If he hid his real name what else
might he be hiding? Did he run away from a wife or from
a jgirl he got into trouble?" This was mostly idte chatter.

New Salem Days 77

For McNamar had a good name for straight dealing in
business, for keeping sober, for no loose ways with girls
and women. He was known for close bargains, had an eye
for where values would rise; he required cash or land in
payments, taking no promissory notes, one woman saying
he was "cold as the multiplication table." He seemed to be
the first of the early investors of New Salem to see that lack
of river navigation and other conditions were to doom the
village. He held off from loans to Camron and Rutledge
when they began taking heavy losses on their sawmill and
gristmill. He did accommodate them by paying $50 for
half of Rutledge's 80 acres at Sand Ridge, seven miles from
New Salem, and paying Camron $400 for one tract of 40
acres and another of 80 acres, also at Sand Ridge. He rode
away from New Salem with no anxiety about promissory
notes, the land he owned sure to rise in value.

And Lincoln, who called McNamar "Mack," who had
surveyed the land McNamar owned, and who had lived
under the same roof with Ann during the months "Mack"
was a boarder at the Rutledge tavern, could hardly have
been unaware of what she was going through. Her well-
known betrothed had gone away saying he would be back
soon; two years had gone by and except for a few weeks at
the beginning no word had come from him. Did she talk
over with Lincoln the questions, bitter and haunting, that
harassed her? Had death taken her betrothed? Or was he
alive and any day would see him riding into New Salem
to claim her? And again, possibly, she kept a silence and
so did Lincoln, and there was some kind of understanding
beneath their joined silence.

Lincoln was to go away and stay away for months on
important duties, writing her no letters that she kept and
saved, she writing him no letters that he laid by as keep-
sakes. During the six weeks he mastered the surveying
books, he could have seen her for only brief moments, if
at all. And his surveying, as he said, "procured bread, and
kept body and soul together." So definitely he was no man
of property who like McNamar could offer her land and
money, the creature comforts of life. He had arrived in
New Salem "a piece of floating driftwood," as he later

78

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

wrote, and was haunted by debts that had crept high on him.
He was aware of large families, nine Rutledge children, 11
Camron daughters, Matthew Marsh writing "twelve is the
least number," and a comment that central Illinois was "a
hard country for women and cattle." His stepmother, Sarah
Bush Lincoln, said he liked people in general, children and
animals, but "he was not very fond of girls."

He was to tell T. W. S. Kidd in Springfield of his first
dream of love. When he was "a little codger" in Indiana a
wagon broke down near their place and a man, his wife and
their two girls came to the Lincoln cabin, cooking their
meals and staying till the wagon was fixed. 'The woman
had books and read us stories," Kidd reported Lincoln. "I
took a great fancy to one of the girls. And when they were
gone I thought of her a great deal, and one day sitting out
in the sun by the house I wrote out a story in my mind."
On his father's horse he rode after the wagon and surprised
them. "I talked with the girl and persuaded her to elope
with me, and that night I put her on my horse, and we
started off across the prairie. After several hours we came
to a camp; and when we rode up we found it was the one
we had left a few hours before and we went in. The next
night we tried again, and the same thing happened — the
horse came back to the same place. And then we concluded
not to elope. I stayed until I had persuaded her father to
give her to me. I always meant to write that story out and
publish it. I began once, but I concluded it was not much
of a story. But I think that was the beginning of love with
me."

A. Y. Ellis, who kept a store where Lincoln had helped
out on busy days, recalled: "He always disliked to wait on
the ladies. He preferred trading with the men and boys, as
he used to say. He was a very shy man of ladies. On one
occasion, when we boarded at the same log tavern, there
came an old lady and her son and three stylish daughters,
from the state of Virginia, and stopped there for two or
three weeks; and during their stay, I do not remember of
Mr. Lincoln ever eating at the same table when they did. I
thought it was on account of his awkward appearance and
his wearing apparel."

The Young Legislator 79

Did he tell Ann of any dream, daydream or reverie that
came to him about love in general or a particular love for
her? Or did he shrink from such talk because she might be
clinging to some last desperate hope that her betrothed
would return? Or did she lean to a. belief that McNamar
was gone for all time, then shifting to another awful possi-
bility that he would surely come back to his land and prop-
erties, perhaps bringing a wife with him? Two years of si-
lence could be heavy and wearing. She was 21 and Lincoln
25 and in the few visits he had time for in this year when
surveying and politics pressed him hard, he may have gone
no further than to be a comforter. He may have touched
and stroked her auburn hair once or more as he looked
deep into her blue eyes and said no slightest word as to
what hopes lay deep in his heart. Her mother could re-
member her singing a hymn he liked, with a line, "Vain
man, thy fond pursuits forbear." Both were figures of fate
— he caught with debts, with surveying "to keep body and
soul together" while flinging himself into intense political
activities, she the victim of a betrothal that had become a
mysterious scandal. They were both young, with hope end-
less, and it could have been he had moments when the sky
was to him a sheaf of blue dreams and the rise of the blood-
gold red of a full moon in the evening was almost too much
to live, see and remember.

Chapter 3

The Young Legislator

On April 19, 1834, Lincoln's name ran again in the San-
gamo Journal as a candidate for the state legislature. Before
that and after, he attended all sorts of political powwows,
large and small, and those for whom he surveyed, and those
he delivered letters to, did not fail to hear he was in the
running. He had become a regular wheel horse of the Whig

80

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

party backed by John T. Stuart, a Springfield lawyer and
county Whig leader. This time Lincoln gave out no long, ad-
dress on issues as two years before. With no presidential
ticket in the field, voters were freer in personal choice.
Bowling Green, a local Democratic leader, out of his liking
for and belief in Lincoln, offered him the support of fel-
low Democrats. Lincoln hesitated, talked it over with Stu-
art, then accepted.

Strong Jackson men, believing Stuart wanted to run for
Congress, were trying to cut Stuart down. At a shooting
match for a beef at Clear Lake, Lincoln told Stuart of
Jackson men proposing to him "that they would drop two
of their men and take him up and vote for him," for the
purpose of beating Stuart. "Lincoln acted fairly and hon-
orably about it by coming to me," said Stuart. "I had great
confidence in my strength — perhaps too much. But I told
Lincoln to go and tell them that he would take their votes —
that I would risk it — and I believe he did so."

So Lincoln played along with the Jackson Democrats
who were after Stuart's scalp and with the Bowling Green
Democrats who loved him for his own sake — speaking little
on issues, and showing up, when there was time, any place
he could meet voters face to face, shake hands, and let
them know what he was like as a man, at Mechanicsburg
taking a hand where fists were flying and ending the fight.

In the election for members of the Ninth General As-
sembly August 4, 1834, Lincoln ran second among 13 San-
gamon County candidates, John Dawson having 1,390
votes, Lincoln, 1,376. Stuart ran fourth, with 1,164 votes,
nosing out the one Democrat Stuart had "concentrated"
against. Now at 25, Lincoln had won his first important po-
litical office, with better pay than ever before in his life,
where he would train in the tangled and, to him, fascinating
games of lawmaking and parliamentary management amid
political labyrinths. After election he ran the post office,
made surveys and appraisals, clerked in an October elec-
tion, made court appearances in connection with his debts,
and November 22 was elected a delegate to the State Edu-
cation Convention to be held in Vandalia December 5. He
had drawn closer to Stuart, who in the Black Hawk War

The Young Legislator 81

had been major of the battalion in which Lincoln was a
company captain, later serving as a private with Lincoln
in Captain lies' and Captain Early's companies. He had
served two years in the legislature, and was an able lawyer,
a handsome man, six feet tall, of Kentucky ancestry, a shut-
mouthed manipulator whose nickname was "Jerry Sly." He
deepened Lincoln's feeling about law study and loaned him
law books.

A man of faith was Coleman Smoot, a well-to-do farmer,
who lent Lincoln $200, Lincoln saying it was Smoot's pen-
alty for voting for him. Lincoln paid a small pressing debt
or two, bought cloth for a suit to be made at $60, and other
apparel. With other members of the legislature, in the last
week of November, he made the two-day 75-mile trip to
Vandalia, the state capital, by stage. When later he saw a
printed statement that he had walked to Vandalia, he wrote
on the same page, "No harm, if true; but, in fact, not true."

Vandalia gave some the impression it had been there a
long time and was a little tired though it was only 15 years
old and had been the capital only 14 years. A town of some
800 people, it overlooked the Kaskaskia River and heavy
timber, and to the north and west rolling prairie. Its streets,
80 feet wide, were lined mostly with log cabins, its side-
walks worn paths in grass. Five or six large frame buildings
were taverns and boardinghouses, now filling their man^
empty rooms with legislators and lobbyists. Two weekly
newspapers, one Democratic and the other Whig, advertised
bedrooms, choice liquors and rewards for fugitive slaves.
Main highways crossed the town, stages rolling in regularly,
their wheels dusty or mud-coated, with passengers from all
directions. The new jail had a "dungeon room" for stubborn
birds and a "debtors' room." Into the latter Lincoln could
stray for a look at men behind bars because they couldn't
pay their debts.

He roomed with Stuart whose leadership made their
room a Whig center. Here and in the legislature Lincoln
was to meet men, most of them young, who would become
governors, Congressmen, U.S. Senators, men of influence
and portent. Here he would meet a short and almost dwarf-
ish man, a little giant, thick of body with a massive head,

82

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

21 years old and absolutely confident of himself — Stephen
A. Douglas lobbying for his selection as state's attorney of
the First Circuit. Many members had their wives and daugh-
ters along and there was a social life new to Lincoln — par-
ties, cotillions, music and flowers, elegant food and liquor,
a brilliance of silk gowns and talk that ranged from idle
gabble to profound conversation about the state and na-
tion. Around the public square in candlelighted taverns,
coffee rooms and hangouts, could be heard the talk and
laughter of men eating, smoking, drinking, greeting, get-
ting acquainted, and no lack of office seekers on the hunt.

On December 1, in a two-story ramshackle brick build-
ing facing the public square, meeting on the lower floor, the
House was called to order, the members sitting in movable
chairs, three to a table — cork inkstands, quill pens and
writing paper on each table — and on the floor a sandbox
as spittoon. A fireplace and stove heated the room. Three
tin dippers hung over a pail of drinking water. Evening
sessions were lighted by candles in tall holders. Ceiling
plaster crashed down occasionally during speeches and
roll calls; members got used to it.

Among the 54 representatives Lincoln could feel that if
he was a greenhorn, so were the other 35 first-term mem-
bers; there were 17 second-termers, and only one veteran of
three previous terms. ^Three-fourths of them were born in
Southern states, only one member a native of Illinois. Seven
members had, like Lincoln, been captains in the Black
Hawk War; many had been privates. More than half were
farmers, one-fourth lawyers, with a sprinkling of mer-
chants and mechanics. A "whole-hog" Jackson man was
elected speaker, Lincoln with other Whigs voting for a less
than "whole-hog" Jackson Democrat. Not till the seventh
ballot did the House elect a doorkeeper, several candidates
being hungry to be doorkeeper. In the next few days the
House heard routine reports and joined in inaugurating
Governor Joseph Duncan of Jacksonville, an 1812 war vet-
eran who at 17 enlisted in the U.S. Infantry and performed
heroic service, a Democrat who had known President Jack-
son personally when serving in Congress and was slowly
moving toward joining the Whigs. Of the 11 standing com-

The Young Legislator 83

mittees Lincoln was appointed to the Committee on Public
Accounts and Expenditures and he was to serve on several
special committees.

On December 5 Lincoln stood up, unfolded to his full
height, and gave notice of a bill he would introduce. And
according to the rules, three days later he laid before them
a bill to limit the jurisdiction of justices of the peace. The
members were interested because they had that week re-
jected a proposal to give the justices wider powers. Days
passed into weeks and Lincoln's bill was rewritten in select
committee, reported to the House where a proposed amend-
ment was debated, and the bill referred to a special com-
mittee, Lincoln being named to the committee. When finally
reported with an amendment it passed the House 39 to 7
and was sent to the Senate where it died of indefinite post-
ponement.

On his tenth day as a member he moved that it should
not be in order "to offer amendments to any bill after its
third reading," and his motion was tabled as too fresh and
uninformed. Better luck came with passage of his bill to
authorize his friend Samuel Musick to build a toll bridge
across Salt Creek in Sangamon County, and another bill
for three Sangamon friends "to view, mark and perma-
nently locate" a road from Springfield to Miller's Ferry. He
offered a resolution that "our Senators be instructed, and
our Representatives requested" to procure a law through
which Illinois would receive not less than 20 per cent of
amounts paid into the Treasury of the United States for
public lands lying within Illinois. The resolution was laid
on the table, without a roll call, and Lincoln let it lay.

He worked and voted for incorporation of a new state
bank in Springfield, the start of an alliance that would go
further. He voted for a canal to connect the Illinois River
with Lake Michigan, looking toward waterway hauls from
mid-Illinois to the Atlantic. His votes generally ran with
those of Stuart and the Whig minority. Several times mem-
bers put in bills that were in Lincoln's handwriting and it
seemed his hand was in more affairs than he openly showed.

The House shook nearer storm on the National Bank
issue than on any- other. President Jackson had gone into

84

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

open battle with the Bank, refusing to favor it with a re-
charter, charging it was a "money power" that bought
newspapers, politicians and Congressmen. Henry Clay,
Daniel Webster and other leading Whigs clashed with
Jackson, who made it an issue in 1832 when farmer and
labor ballots gave Jackson 219 votes in the electoral college
as against 49 for Clay. When the U.S. Senate denounced
Jackson's course as lawless and unconstitutional, Jackson
replied with a fierce protest which the Senate refused to
print in its journal. Lincoln heard many hours of hot parti-
san debate on pro-Jackson and anti-National Bank resolu-
tions. He voted with the Whigs on all such resolutions ex-
cept once when he indicated he believed the U.S. Senate
ought to have allowed Jackson's answer to the Senate to be
printed in its journal.

Questions came up of salary raises, public roads, school
funds, the public printer, the state militia, regulation of
gamblers, leasing of convict labor. Lincoln worked on a
committee which revived an earlier law to penalize the
changing of brands on livestock with intent to steal. He
served on another committee on an act "to simplify pro-
ceedings at law for the collection of debts."

Once he had the House laughing. It had nominated Sam-
uel McHatton to be surveyor of Schuyler County and the
Senate had appointed him, information then coming that
there was no vacancy; the former surveyor still lived. On
a motion that McHatton's nomination "be vacated" Lincoln
remarked that the new surveyor could not legally oust the
old one so long as the incumbent persisted in not dying.
Let the matter be, he suggested, "so that if the old surveyor
should hereafter conclude to die, there would be a new one
ready without troubling the legislature." In the end the mat-
ter was laid on the table as Lincoln had suggested. Often
there had been laughter when some member moved to lay a
measure on the table "until next Fourth of July." One
lobbyist noted Lincoln in this legislature as "raw-boned,
angular, features deeply furrowed, ungraceful, almost un-
couth . . . and yet there was a magnetism and dash about
the man that made him a universal favorite."

Before midnight of February 13 the last batch of hacked

The Young Legislator 85

and amended bills was passed and Lincoln in two days of
below-zero weather rode the stage to New Salem.

After the fixed program and schedules of Vandalia, the
smoke-filled rooms and hullabaloo, Lincoln now rode lonely
country roads and walked in open winter air over fields he
was surveying. He had seen lawmaking and politics at a
vortex and vague resolves deepened in him. And as he wrote
later, he "still mixed in the surveying to pay board and
clothing bills"; his law books, "dropped" when a legislature
met, "were taken up again at the end of the session." The
Sangamo Journal had announced he was its New Salem
agent and would take "Meal, Buckwheat, flour, pork on
newspaper accounts."

Before March was over he had completed several sur-
veys, writing of posts, mounds, white oaks, Burr oaks,
Spanish oaks, as land markers, writing scores of such me-
ticulous sentences as: "Begining at the North East corner
of the same at a White Oak 14 inches S 16 W. 78 Links
White Oak 10 inches N 1 E. 66 Links." After March he
seemed to have little surveying work over the rest of 1835.
During that year, of whatever letters he wrote only three
were kept and saved and they were scant and perfunctory,
shedding no light on his personal life or love or growth. It
was certain that Ann Rutledge and Lincoln knew each other
and he took an interest in her; probably they formed some
mutual attachment not made clear to the community; pos-
sibly they loved each other and her hand went into his long
fingers whose bones told her of refuge and security. They
were the only two persons who could tell what secret they
shared, if any. It seemed definite that she had had letters
from McNamar and probable that after a time she had
once written him that she expected release from her pledge.
Summer of 1835 came and in September it would be three
years since McNamar had gone, more than two years since
any letter had come from him.

Lincoln was reading law, hoping and expecting the next
year to be admitted for practice. Later he advised a young
student, "Get the books, and read and study them till you
understand them in their principal features; and that is the

86

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

main thing . . . Your own resolution to succeed, is more
important than any other one thing." His resolution to
study law drove him hard; friends worried about his health;
he couldn't call on Ann often or for long. It was a seven-
mile ride or walk when he called on her and her folks or at
the nearby farm of "Uncle Jimmy" Short where Ann
worked for a time. That she was earning wages meant the
family was less well off than it had been and what money
she saved could go for her expenses at the Jacksonville Fe-
male Academy 25 miles away which she "had a notion" to
enter in the fall term. Her brother David was a student at
Illinois College in Jacksonville and by a fellow student sent
a three-in-one letter dated July 27, 1835, one to his father,
another to a friend James Kittridge, and to his sister the fol-
lowing:

To Anna Rutledge:

Valued Sister. So far as I can understand Miss
Graves will teach another school in the Diamond
Grove. I am glad to hear that you have a notion of
comeing to school, and I earnestly recommend to you
that you would spare no time from improving your
education and mind. Remember that Time is worth
more than all gold therefore throw away none of your
golden moments. I add nomore, but &c.

D. H. Rutledge.

There seemed to have been an understanding between
Ann and Lincoln, with no pledges, that they would take
what luck might hand them in whatever was to happen,
while they advanced their education. Lincoln had his debts,
his law studies, his driving political ambitions, while she
had her quandaries related to John McNamar. They would
see what time might bring. August came and corn and
grass stood stunted for lack of rain. Settlers came down
with chills, fever, malaria, Lincoln for his aches taking
spoonfuls of Peruvian bark, boneset tea, jalap and calomel.

Soon New Salem heard that Ann Rutledge lay fever-
burned, her malady baffling the doctors. Many went out to
the Rutledge place. Days passed. Her cousin, McGrady

The Young Legislator 87

Rutledge, a year younger than Ann, rode to New Salem and
told Lincoln of her sickness growing worse. Lincoln rode
out and they let him in for what might be his last hoiir with
her. He saw her pale face and wasted body, the blue eyes
and auburn hair perhaps the same as always. Few words
were spoken, probably, and he might have gone only so far
as to let his bony right hand and gnarled fingers lie softly
on a small white hand while he tried for a few monosyl-
lables of bright hope.

A few days later, on August 25, 1835, death came to
Ann Rutledge and burial was in nearby Concord cemetery.
Whether Lincoln went to her funeral, whether he wept in
grief with others at the sight of her face in the burial box,
no one later seemed to know. Her cousin, McGrady Rut-
ledge, wrote far later, "Lincoln took her death verry hard."
A letter of Matthew Marsh September 17 had a tone as
though the postmaster Lincoln was in good health and
cheer. But this tells us nothing of Lincoln's inner feelings.
Later when Lincoln was the center of incalculable death
and agony and a friend rebuked him for telling funny
stories, he cried back, "Don't you see that if I didn't laugh
I would have to weep?" He did no doubt take Ann's death
"verry hard" yet he was ambulant and doing his work as
shown by a timberland survey he completed and dated Sep-
tember 24, 1835.

It was to come to pass that 30 years later New Salem
villagers soberly spoke and wrote that Lincoln went out of
his mind, wandered in the woods mumbling and crazy, and
had to be locked up, all of which was exaggeration and
reckless expansion of his taking Ann's death "verry hard."
Woven with the recollections of his "insanity" were also
the testimonies of what a deep flaming of lyric love there
had been between him and Ann. A legend of a shining,
deathless, holy and pure passion arose, spread, grew by
some inherent vital sheen of its own or the need of those
who wanted it, of Ann Rutledge, as a poet wrote, "beloved
in life of Abraham Lincoln/ wedded to him,/ not through
union,/but through separation."

To this young raw country John McNamar returned
three weeks after Ann died, bringing with him his aged

88

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

mother, and reported that his father had died and he had
straightened out what there was of the estate. What he
said of Ann's passing and whether he visited the grave of
his once-betrothed, of this there is no record. He may have
gone the following December to attend at his farm the fu-
neral services of her father who died at 54. Shortly after,
he notified the Rutledge and Camron families they must
move out from his place. Ann's younger sister, Sarah, lived
to be 87 and at 86 an inquirer asked her where Ann had
died and she answered, "I was only a little girl of six. It
was not our house. The owner came back, and after father's
death, we could not pay the rent. He turned mother out;
and we had to move to Iowa and begin all over again. I re-
member how sad and how brave she was." To the question
who was the owner of the house, she said, after thinking a
while, "It was John McNamar! He was the man who turned
mother out!"

In 1838 McNamar married and after the death of his
first wife married again. Each ceremony was performed by
a justice of the peace, one preacher taking note that the
fees of ministers ran higher. McNamar built a commodious
brick house on his farm and across the road a big barn for
his fat livestock. Thirty years later when asked if he could
locate the grave of Ann, he could give no help, though in
one letter he wrote, "I cut the initials of Miss Ann Rut-
ledge on a b[o]ard at the head of her grave thirty years
ago." In another letter 30 years after Ann's death he wrote
that there had been no rivalry between him and Lincoln
and that Ann at the time she met Lincoln "attended a liter-
ary institution at Jacksonville, in company with her
brother." He once intimated that Ann had died broken-
hearted waiting for him and in a letter described her
quaintly and with charm: "Miss Ann was a gentle Amiable
Maiden without any of the airs of your city Belles but win-
some and comly withal a blond in complection with golden
hair, 'cherry red lips & a bonny Blue Eye.' " A Springfield
lawyer in his brick farmhouse asked him where Ann had
died and he pointed a trembling finger toward the west.
"There, by that," he began, seeming choked with emotion,
"there, by that currant bush, she died," giving the lawyer a

The Young Legislator 89

first impression that he had bought the land because Ann
had died on it, even though at the moment he had buried
one wife and married a second. He became county assessor
and proved honest and fair. He lived to be 78 unaware that
in chronicles to come he would figure as an enigmatic lover.

Was there a blood strain in Lincoln that had its way in
his affair with Ann Rutledge and in his entanglement with
two women later? That could have been and was more than
a possibility. Northwest in Hancock County were cousins
and kinsmen of his, one of them, Mordecai Lincoln, a son
of Lincoln's Uncle Mordecai. When living in Leitchfield,
Grayson County, Kentucky, he was a tailor, a carpenter, a
fiddler, but mostly a shoemaker, and at times a hard
drinker. People called him a woman-hater, sworn never to
marry. Yet letters showed him drawn deeply toward a girl
named Patsy; they kept steady company till the evening
when, under her mother's advice, it was said, she offered
herself to Mordecai. And that night Mordecai had rushed
from Patsy's house, didn't take time to stop in his home for
his belongings, and headed for Fountain Green in Hancock
County, Illinois. Patsy's father wrote a letter to Mordecai's
cousin, James Lincoln, in Hancock County, of Patsy taking
it hard, of the "painful circumstances of Mordecai's de-
parture," and that Mordecai could have "stuck to the noble
resolution [not to drink] he took six or seven months pre-
vious."

In Fountain Green Mordecai made wagons, cabinets, cof-
fins, visited neighbors without telling them he was coming,
talked politics, religion, gossip, played the violin, though
no one could tell when he would go moody and sit brood-
ing. His cousins, James and Abraham, a justice of the peace,
and still other Lincolns, were talked about as changeable
from infectious bright laughing moods to spells of gloom
and silence. Though "Old Mord," as he was called before
he was 40, had a name as a woman-hater, he had a secret
heart. A letter he wrote to "My Favorite Girl, Elizabeth,"
said, "The first time I ever saw you in my life, my mind
was filled with the site of your person, but such was the
circumstances in my life that I thought it better for me

90 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

never to see you nor any other girl that there was any like-
lihood of my becoming so greatly attached too. But by
that means I have added fuel to the flame that is burning
in my bosom . . . Elizabeth, I naturally hone for your
company here with me, but when I look around you are not
here. All that I could do is to nourish and cherish , my
strongest wishes . . ." He bought paper of robin's-egg blue
for this letter and having written it he kept and saved it and
never sent it to Elizabeth!

Still keeping a reputation as a woman-hater, when he
was 50 he wrote "Dear Catherine," a schoolteacher who
had been slandered, that he defended her good name,
wanted her "the worst of anything," and if she could not
accept him, let her think now and then of him as he always
thought of her. This he mailed to Catherine, making a copy
for himself, while he went on living alone with his dog, cat,
books, lathe and tools. He lived on, often saying hard words
of priests he didn't like, and dying in the Catholic faith in
which his mother had reared him and his brothers and sis-
ters.

In the Lincolns of Hancock County could there be any
clues or derivations related to a wavering, hesitant love that
Lincoln might have held for Ann Rutledge, a love so deep
and strangely dazzling that it shook him with fear and
gloom? Lincoln knew of his first cousin Mordecai living in
Fountain Green and later was to go out of his way for a
visit and talk with Mordecai.

Only Mordecai of the Lincolns at Fountain Green had
the name of a woman-hater, but of the others it was said,
"It seemed as if it was because they cared so much for
women they were overwhelmed with the thought of mar-
riage." They were known as men who could love women
but were shy of marriage. They seemed to ask whether
they loved enough and whether they had a right to marry.
Among these Hancock County Lincolns there was never a
divorce after marriage and for all their spells of gloom never
a case of insanity.

Usher F. Linder wrote of Abe Lincoln and his uncle
Mordecai being a good deal alike as storytellers. "No one
took offense at Uncle Mord's stories. I heard him tell a

The Young Legislator 91

bevy of fashionable girls that he knew a very large woman
who had a husband so small that in the night she often
mistook him for the baby, and that one night she picked
him up and was singing to him a soothing lullaby when he
awoke and told her that the baby was on the other side
of the bed." Lincoln remarked, "Linder, I have often said
that Uncle Mord ran off with all the talents of the family."

In a snowfall over hills and rolling prairie Lincoln rode
a stage, arriving to see Vandalia blanketed white. A special
session of the legislature opened December 7, 1835. The
senators on the upper floor were not feeling good about
fresh large cracks down the walls, the north wall bulging
out and snow sifting down on the floor which at its center
had sunk half a foot. Over the next six weeks 139 bills came
up in the House; 17 railroads chartered for Illinois towns
that wanted to see the cars and hear the whistles. Half the
bills introduced were passed, the most important the one
for the Illinois and Michigan Canal, whereby wheat selling
in Illinois at 50 cents the bushel, after the Great Lakes
haul, would bring $1.25 in Buffalo. Lincoln again put in a
bill "supplemental" to his of the previous session "for the
relief of insolvent debtors," which passed the House and
failed in the Senate. He gave special attention, writing one
amendment, to a bill that passed to incorporate the Beards-
town and Sangamon Canal ending at the projected town of
Huron at Miller's Ferry northwest of New Salem. Friends
of Lincoln had invested in prospective Huron. Lincoln
the next year was to own several lots there which came to
him for surveying services, besides buying a nearby tract of
47 acres. In a speech at Petersburg, he advised people to
buy stock in the canal and probably bought some of the
stock himself, one of his few mild adventures in specula-
tion and management toward paying his debts. The canal
never got dug, but for a time it was a high hope of its pro-
moters.

At all times national politics boiled and seethed. Under a
orders from President Jackson a Democratic national con-
vention had nominated Martin Van Buren for President,
Illinois Whigs favoring a former Jackson man, Hugh White

92

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

of Tennessee. The Whigs fought against resolutions prais-
ing Jackson and Van Buren, and most of all against ap-
proval of nominating conventions, a new way of naming
candidates. Before this a man announcing he would run for
an office was then a candidate; under the new nominating
conventions he would need the good will and the say-so of
politicians, the Sangamo Journal, speaking for most of the
Whigs, saying the voter now must give up private judg-
ment and "be led up to the polls by a twine through the
gristle of the proboscis." The "whole-hog" Jackson men
were aiming to get better party loyalty from the "milk-and-
cider" Jackson men, setting forth that they would expel
from the party any man not loyal to candidates nominated
by a party convention.

Lincoln and Stuart were pleased that John Dawson,
Sangamon County Democrat, was switching to the Whigs.
On an "act to improve the breed of cattle," nicknamed
"the little bull bill," providing for inspectors in each town-
ship to keep bulls over one year of age from running at
large, Lincoln voted Nay, perhaps knowing the very names
of farmers backing him who had roving bulls. The reappor-
tionment act, increasing the House from 55 to 91 members,
went too far, Lincoln advised, but it satisfied him that
Sangamon County was to have seven representatives instead
of four. He collected $262 as his pay for the session and
after adjournment January 18 rode the stage homeward in
that occasional fair and warmer Illinois winter weather
that whispers of spring on the way.

Again Lincoln worked away as surveyor, law student,
politician. He wrote, signed and got other signers to a peti-
tion to a county court for an increased allowance for sup-
port of Benjamin Elmore, the insane son of widow Jemima
Elmore. He wrote wills, located roads, settled boundary dis-
putes, and on March 26 advertised a reward for return of
his horse, "a large bay horse, star in his forehead, eight
years old, shod all round, and trots and paces." On March
24 the Sangamon Circuit Court recorded him as a person
of good moral character, his first step toward admission to
the bar and law practice. He advertised that 64 persons
had uncalled-for letters which unless called for would be

The Young Legislator 93

sent to the dead-letter office. On May 30 he handed out
mail as postmaster for the last time and told his New Salem
public that their post office was moved to Petersburg.

The convention system not yet operating, he put himself
in the running in June as a candidate for the legislature,
writing in the Sangamo Journal, "I go for all sharing the
privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its
burthens . . . admitting all whites to the right of suffrage,
who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding fe-
males.)" And next November, "if alive," he would vote for
Hugh L. White, the Whig candidate for President. He
stumped the county, often speaking as one of a string of
Whig candidates.

In Springfield he clashed with George Forquer, a lawyer
who had switched from Whig to Democrat, then being
appointed by the Jackson administration as register of the
land office at $3,000 a year. On his elegant new frame
house Forquer had put up the first lightning rod in that
part of Illinois, a sight people went out of their way to see.
After a speech in the courthouse by Lincoln, Forquer
took the platform saying the young man who had just spo-
ken was sailing too high and would have to be "taken
down" and he was sorry the task devolved on him, then
made what was termed a "slasher-gaff speech." Lincoln
stood by with folded arms, stepped to the platform, made
a quiet argument in reply and then, as others recalled it, a
stormy finish: "I desire to live, and I desire place and dis-
tinction; but I would rather die now than, like the gentle-
man, live to see the day that I could change my politics for
an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then feel
compelled to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty con-
science from an offended God." Some who were there said
that friends carried Lincoln from the courthouse on their
shoulders.

Of one of his speeches the Sangamo Journal said, "A girl
might be born and become a mother before the Van Buren
men will forget Mr. Lincoln." In the election August 1 the
county gave Lincoln the highest vote of 17 candidates for
the legislature. Sangamon County was taken by the Whigs,
having now seven representatives and two senators.

94

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Soon after this sweeping victory Lincoln in stride took
his bar examination before two justices of the Supreme
Court, passed, gave a dinner to his examiners, and on Sep-
tember 9, 1836, held in his hands a license to practice law in
all the courts of Illinois, On October 5 he was in a Spring-
field court, appearing in a case for John T. Stuart, the be-
ginning of their partnership as a law firm. In three related
suits brought by James P. Hawthorn Lincoln was defend-
ing David Wooldridge. Hawthorn claimed Wooldridge was
to furnish him two yoke of oxen to break up 20 acres of
prairie sod ground and was to allow him to raise a crop of
corn or wheat on a certain piece of ground; and Wool-
dridge had failed him in both cases. Furthermore, Haw-
thorn claimed damages because Wooldridge struck, beat,
bruised, and knocked him down; plucked, pulled, and tore
large quantities of hair from his head; with a stick and his
fists struck Hawthorn many violent blows on or about the
face, head, breast, back, shoulders, hips, legs and divers
other parts of the body, and had with violence forced,
pushed, thrust and gouged his fingers into Hawthorn's eyes.

Such were the allegations, including replevin action de-
manding return of a black and white yoke of steers, one
black cow and calf, and one prairie plow. Lincoln's first
move was to bring up a board bill for eight months which
Hawthorn owed Wooldridge, amounting at $1.50 a week
to $45.75. Also, besides a cash loan of $100, he had used
for the same eight months a wagon and team for which he
should pay $90. In proceedings out of court Lincoln lost on
one count, with settlement on the other two, plaintiff and
defendant dividing court costs.

In October and November he made three more known
surveys and said good-by to surveying.

The tall Whigs from Sangamon County averaged six feet
in height, Lincoln the longest, and were nicknamed the
"Long Nine." Riding the stage to Vandalia two days, they
talked about schemes and strategy that would carry through
the legislature the one law more important to thqm than
any other, an act to make Springfield the capital of Illi-
nois. Arriving, they saw that Vandalia citizens, scared by

The Young Legislator 95

the talk of moving the capital, had torn down the old build-
ing and were just finishing a new capital in the center of
the public square. Lincoln looked it over, stepping around
workmen still on the job, tool sheds and piles of scaffold-
ing lumber, piles of unused sand, brick and stone, perhaps
laughing at the building hardly large enough to hold the
new legislature, with no look toward future needs.

The legislature opened December 5, 1836, old members
and 66 new ones smelling a pungent odor of fresh damp
plaster. Governor Duncan's message advised state financial
support for "all canals and railroads." On the 17 railroads
and two canals chartered at the last session not a track
had been laid nor a spade of dirt dug. The new dynamic
member, Stephen A. Douglas, brought in a huge omnibus
bill from the Committee on Internal Improvements. Nearly
every town in the state wanted a railroad or canal and this
bill would give it to them at a cost of $10,000,000, the
state to sell bonds of that amount. On the same day the
session began, this $10,000,000 program had been ap-
proved by an Internal Improvement State Convention, its
delegates businessmen of wealth and power, including
Thomas Mather, president of the State Bank in Spring-
field of which bank Lincoln was continuously an active
friend. As chairman of the Finance Committee Lincoln
reported that the state had balanced its budget and had a
surplus of $2,743.18, being strictly solvent.

The trading and logrolling began over the huge omnibus
bill — "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours." Lin-
coln had become Whig floor leader and with the Long Nine
worked all the time at as many bargains and favors as pos-
sible for other members with an eye on the votes that would
be needed to change the capital to Springfield. Across weeks
the omnibus bill was changed, mangled, put together again,
till every town and county had something from the "grab
bag" — the railroad, track spur, canal, turnpike or other
improvement it wanted. Lincoln, though not a member,
spent so much time discussing amendments with the Inter-
nal Improvements Committee that one member later
seemed to remember Lincoln was part of the committee.
The West was young, immigrants by millions were to come,

96

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

the future was all rosy, said the pioneer stock that believed
in "boom or bust." Springfield was not alone in adding a
thousand of population in seven years. The reckless, over-
loaded $10,000,000 Internal Improvements Bill passed by
61 to 25. There was a Council of Revision veto over which
the bill was repassed by 53 to 20. Lincoln joined with a
majority which voted to refuse to put the bill to a vote of
the people.

On a bill to shape a new county out of Sangamon and
other counties, making changes endangering the Long Nine
politically, Lincoln maneuvered with amendments that de-
feated the bill. When Usher F. Linder put in resolutions
for a sweeping investigation of the management of the State
Bank of Illinois in Springfield, Lincoln made a long speech
of cogent argument and pointed humor, saying Linder had
"the faculty of entangling a subject, so that neither himself,
or any other man, can find head or tail* to it."

Back of an investigation that would cost ten or twelve
thousand dollars, Lincoln saw rival interests. "These capi-
talists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece
the people, and now, that they have got into a quarrel with
themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's
money to settle the quarrel." Lincoln denied being a spe-
cial advocate of the Bank but he would stand against any
politicians trying to harm the credit of the Bank. And the
House heard him: "Mr. Chairman, this movement is ex-
clusively the work of politicians; a set of men who have
interests aside from the interests of the people, and who,
to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one
long step removed from honest men. I say this with the
greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none
can regard it as personal." Linder's resolution was trimmed
to a limited investigation which ended in a report favorable
to the Bank. On a later bill to increase by $2,000,000 the
capital stock of the Bank, Lincoln voted Yea with the ma-
jority.

In three ballots for U.S. Senator, Lincoln voted for
Archibald Williams of Quincy, a lawyer from Kentucky
, who had switched from Democrat to Whig. Election went
to Richard M. Young, a circuit judge and a "milk-and-

The Young Legislator - 97

cider" Jackson man who ran ahead of a "whole-hog" Jack-
son man, Williams running third. In celebration fine wines
and liquors flowed at a supper where dishes and goblets
went flying and Stephen A. Douglas and James Shields
danced on a table to the length of it amid cigar smoke,
ribald songs and the laughter and follies of drinking men.
Judge Young was pleased next day to pay $600 for the sup-
per, cigars, drinks and damages.

Of Archibald Williams, Lincoln was to see more. They
were tall and angular, alike in homely looks and humor.
Williams' clothes were so careless that once a hotel clerk,
seeing him loaf in a chair, begged pardon and asked, "Are
you a guest of this hotel?" and Williams in a cool snarl,
"Hell, no! I am one of its victims, paying five dollars a
day!" Williams was the kind of man Lincoln could talk with
about Andrew McCorkle, near Springfield, who was afraid
the railroads would scare his cows so they wouldn't give
milk. Or the mob that went to the house of a man and took
him away and hanged him to a tree; the night was dark and
in the morning they saw they had hanged the wrong man;
and they went and told the widow, "The laugh is on us!" Or
the revolt of the small farmers against fines to be laid on
them when their "little bulls" strayed; they had roared so
loud that the House on December 19 had repealed its act of
the previous session by 81 to 4. And it bordered on humor
of some generous kind when an omnibus bill granting di-
vorces to a number of persons was amended to read, "and
all other persons who are desirous of being divorced." Or a
bill to provide a 50-cent bounty for "wolf scalps with the
ears thereon."

In the House were 64 Democrats to 27 Whigs but in the
Senate the roll was 22 Democrats to 18 Whigs. Through
Lincoln's strategy the Senate first took up a bill to "perma-
nently locate the seat of government of the State of Illi-
nois." The bill passed and went to the House where maneu-
ver and debate began to rage. A Coles County man who had
"been seen" by Lincoln, moved an amendment which
passed, that no less than $50,000 and two acres of land
must be donated by the new capital when chosen; this would
be a mean obstacle to rivals of Springfield. Other amend-

98 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

ments, aimed at butchering the bill, came up and failed in
the late afternoon as candles were lighted and members
could see out of the windows a driving snow. Some mem-
bers had left the hall as though there would be only more
monotonous amendments. Then suddenly a motion was
made to table the bill "until next Fourth of July." And the
motion passed by 39 to 38! Lincoln and the seven of the
Long Nine in the House voted Nay. It looked like the end
for their hope of making Springfield the new capital.

That night Lincoln called his Sangamon County col-
leagues into conference and gave each an assignment. They
went out into the driving snow and knocked on doors. They
found five members who had voted to table and brought
them to change their vote in the morning. They located ab-
sentees of the afternoon who favored the bill and got their
word to be surely on hand in the morning. Of five members
whom they had favored with votes for railroads or canals
they asked for a little gratitude. To others they threatened
that in the Internal Improvements Bill, not yet passed by the
Senate, their two Sangamon senators and others might rub
out some of the railroads and canals. To Benjamin Enloe
of Johnson County they pointed out that the longest rail-
road in the state was to run along the west line of his
county. Also it seemed they promised to make Enloe warden
of the state penitentiary, which promise they kept that
very month. From door to door and room to room went
Lincoln's colleagues using persuasions and threats.

Next morning, February 18, Enloe moved the bill "be
re-considered." A roll call demanded by Douglas showed
42 Yea and 40 Nay. One member shifting from Yea to Nay
would have killed the bill. A motion to table "until the 4th
of July next" lost by 37 to 46. It was hazardous and deli-
cately shaded politics Lincoln was playing.

Over the next week came more amendments and harass-
ing tactics, including a motion to postpone selection of a
new capital till December 1839. On the third reading of the
bill February 24, 1837, the House passed it by 46 to 37.
The House and Senate then held a joint session on location
and the fourth ballot gave Springfield 73, Vandalia 16,
Jacksonville 11, Peoria 8, Alton 6, Illiopolis 3— Henry Mills

The Young Legislator 99

of Edwards voting for Purgatory on the third ballot. The
losers charged "bargain and corruption." But it was all over
and Springfield put on a jubilee; citizens howled and danced
around a big bonfire blazing at the old whipping post on
the public square till that relic was ashes.

In the Southern States it was against the law to speak
against slavery; agitators of slave revolts would be hanged
and had been. The 3,000,000 Negro workers in the South-
ern States on the tax books were livestock valued at more
than a billion dollars. In political parties and churches, in
business partnerships and families, the slavery question was
beginning to split the country in two. The secret "Under-
ground Railway" ran from Slave States across Free States
and over the line into Canada. An antislavery man would
keep a runaway slave in his house, cellar or barn, and at
night or in a load of hay In the daytime, pass him along to
the next "station." Officers and slaveowners came north
with warrants hunting their runaway property; Illinois was
seeing them often. Also bogus slave hunters in southern Illi-
nois kidnaped free Negroes, took them to slave soil and
sold them. The governor had sent a brief note with me-
morials from six states notifying the House that the slavery
question was becoming a burning issue.

Amid this welter, Lincoln could understand his fellow
members in resolutions declaring: "We highly disapprove
of the formation of abolition societies; . . . the right of
property in slaves is sacred to the slave-holding States by
the Federal Constitution, and . . . they cannot be deprived
of that right without their consent ..."

Lincoln voted against these resolutions, joined by only
five other members, one of them Dan Stone, a Yankee
graduate of Middlebury College, a lawyer and a member
of the Ohio Legislature before coming to Springfield in
1833. Stone and Lincoln, three days before the legislature
adjourned March 6, recorded this protest in language com-
pletely courteous but quietly unmistakable in meaning:

Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery
having passed both branches of the General Assembly

100

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

at its present session, the undersigned hereby protest
against the passage of the same.

They believe that the institution of slavery is
founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the
promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to in-
crease than abate its evils.

They believe that the Congress of the United States
has no power under the constitution, to interfere with
the institution of slavery in the different States.

They believe that the Congress of the United States
has the power, under the constitution, to abolish slav-
ery in the District of Columbia; but that that power
ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the
people of said District.

The difference between these opinions and those
contained in the said resolutions, is their reason for
entering this protest.

In December of this winter, Lincoln had written a drawl-
ing, hesitant, half-bashful letter to the daughter of a rich
farmer in Green County, Kentucky, Miss Mary Owens,
four months older than Lincoln, plump-faced, with a head
of dark curly hair, large blue eyes, five feet five inches high.
On her first visit to New Salem three years before, she had
interested Lincoln; her sister, Mrs. Bennett Abell, at whose
house Lincoln had stayed, played matchmaker and wanted
the two to get married. When starting for a visit with her
sister in Kentucky, Mrs. Abell, perhaps only joking, said
she would bring her sister back if Lincoln would marry her.
And Lincoln said, perhaps only joking, that he accepted the
proposal to become Mrs. Abell's brother-in-law.

When Miss Owens came back to New Salem with her
sister in November 1836, Lincoln saw three years had
worked changes, Miss Owens having lost bloom, lost teeth,
and become stout. He made love to her, it seemed, in a
rather easy careless way. And she held him off as one
trained in Kentucky schools for refined young ladies,
dressed in what one of the Greens called "the finest trim-
mings I ever saw." She noted Lincoln as "deficient in those
little links which make up a woman's happiness." A party

The Young Legislator 101

riding to Uncle Billy Greene's came to a creek branch with
a treacherous crossing. Miss Owens noticed the other men
helping their partners, Lincoln riding ahead of her without
looking back. "You are a nice fellow!" heard Lincoln when
she caught up with him. "I suppose you did not care
whether my neck was broken or not." And he had laughed
back a defense compliment; he knew she was smart enough
to take care of herself. She climbed a steep hill with Lincoln
and Mrs. Bowling Green, Lincoln joking and talking to her,
not once offering to help carry the fat baby in Mrs. Green's
arms. It seemed to Miss Owens to be "neglect" on Lin-
coln's part.

He puzzled her; in some things he was so softhearted. He
told her he saw "a hog mired down" one day crossing a
prairie and being "fixed up" in his best clothes, he said to
himself he would pass on. But after he had passed on, the
hog haunted him and seemed to be saying, "There, now my
last hope is gone," and he had gone back and got the hog
loose from the mire. Miss Owens had ideas about chivalry
and wondered how a man could be so thoughtful about a
mired hog and another time be so lost in his own feelings
that he couldn't stay alongside his woman partner when
riding across a dangerous creek. They had some vague un-
derstanding that they might marry. Lincoln had written her
one letter she hadn't answered, and one cold, lonesome win-
ter night, he wrote her a second letter:

Vandalia, Deer. 13, 1836

Mary

I have been sick ever since my arrival here, or I
should have written sooner. It is but little difference,
however, as I have verry little even yet to write. And
more, the longer I can avoid the mortification of look-
ing in the Post Office for your letter and not finding it,
the better. You see I am mad about that old letter yet
I dont like verry well to risk you again. I'll try you once
more any how.

The new State House is not yet finished, and conse-
quently the legislature is doing little or nothing. The
Governor delivered an inflamitory political Message,

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

and it is expected there will be some sparring between
the parties about [it as] soon as the two Houses get to
business. Taylor [deliv]ered up his petitions for the
New County to one of [our me]mbers this morning. I
am told that he dispairs [of its] success on account of
all the members from Morg[an Qounty opposing
it. There are names enough on the petition!,] I think,
to justify the members from our county in going for it;
but if the members from Morgan oppose it, which they
[say] they will, the chance will be bad.

Our chance to [take th]e seat of Government to
Springfield is better than I ex[pected]. An Internal-
Improvement Convention was held here since we met,
which recommended a loan of several mill[ions] of
dollars on the faith of the State to construct Rail
Roads. Some of the legislature are for it[,] and some
against it; which has the majority I can not tell. There
is great strife and struggling for the office of U.S. Sena-
tor here at this time. It is probable we shall ease their
pains in a few days. The opposition men have no candi-
date of their own, and consequently they smile as com-
placently at the angry snarls of the contending Van
Buren candidates and their respective friends, as the
christian does at Satan's rage. You recollect I men-
tioned in the outset of this letter that I had been un-
well. That is the fact, though I believe I am well about
now; but that, with other things I can not account for,
have conspired and have gotten my spirits so low, that
I feel that I would rather be any place in the world
than here. I really can not endure the thought of stay-
ing here ten weeks. Write back as soon as you get this,
and if possible say something that will please me, for
really I have not [been] pleased since I left you. This
letter is so dry and [stupid] that I am ashamed to send
it, but with my presfent] feelings I can not do any
better.

Give my respects to M[r. and] Mrs. Abell and
family.

Your friend

Lincoln

The Young Legislator 103

He was as cryptic in writing to her as she was in not writing
to him. It was a letter of loneliness and of hunger for love
and hope running low of any answering love.

Robert L. Wilson of the village of Athens and one of the
Long Nine wrote of Lincoln as having "a quaint and pe-
culiar way" and "he frequently startled us." He seemed a
"born" politician. "We followed his lead; but he followed
nobody's lead. It may almost be said that he did our think-
ing for us. He inspired respect, although he was careless
and negligent ... He was poverty itself, but independent."
They had seen much of each other in the legislature and
campaigning together, Wilson writing, "He sought com-
pany, and indulged in fun without stint . .. . still when by
himself, he told me that he was so overcome by mental de-
pression, that he never dared carry a knife in his pocket;
and as long as I was intimately acquainted with him, he
never carried a pocketknife." At a banquet in Athens, Wil-
son gave the toast: "Abraham Lincoln; one of Nature's
Noblemen."

In Springfield, Lincoln read lavish compliments to him-
self in the press and sat with the Long Nine and 60 guests
at a game supper where one toast ran: "Abraham Lincoln:
he has fulfilled the expectations of his friends, and disap-
pointed the hopes of his enemies."

In April he packed his saddlebags to leave New Salem
where six years before he had arrived, as he said, "a piece
of floating driftwood," being now a licensed lawyer, a mem-
ber of the state legislature and floor leader of the Whig
party. The hilltop village, now fading to become a ghost
town, had been to him a nourishing mother, a neighbor-
hood of many names and faces that would always be dear
and cherished with him, a friendly place with a peculiar
equality between man and man, where Bill Greene was
nearly correct in saying, "In New Salem every man is a
principal citizen." Bitter hours but more sweet than bitter
he had had. Here he had groped in darkness and grown to-
ward light. Here newspapers, books, mathematics, law, the
ways of people and life, had taken on new and subtle mean-
ings for him.

Chapter 4

Lawyer in Springfield

Springfield with 1,400 inhabitants in 1837 was selling to
18,000 people of the county a large part of their supplies,
tools, groceries, and buying grain, pork and farm produce.
There were 19 dry-goods besides other general stores, six
churches, 11 lawyers and 18 doctors. Farm women coming
to town wore shoes where they used to be barefoot; men
had changed from moccasins to rawhide boots and shoes.
Carriages held men in top boots and ruffled silk shirts*
women in silks and laces. It was no wilderness that Abra-
ham Lincoln, 28 years old, saw as he rode into Springfield
April 15, 1837. Many of its people had come from Ken-
tucky by horse, wagon and boat, across country not yet
cleared of wolves, wildcats and horse thieves. A Yankee
antislavery element in the Presbyterian Church had seceded
to form a Second Presbyterian Church. And there were in
Sangamon County 78 free Negroes, 20 registered inden-
tured servants and six slaves.

Lincoln pulled in his horse at the general store of Joshua
Speed. He asked the price of bedclothes for a single bed-
stead, which Speed figured at $17. "Cheap as it is, I have
not the money to pay," he told Speed. "But if you will
credit me until Christmas, and my experiment here as a
lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail in that I
will probably never pay you at all." Speed said afterward:
"The tone of his voice was so melancholy that I felt for
him ... I thought I never saw so gloomy and melancholy
a face in my life." Speed offered to share his own big dou-
ble bed upstairs over the store. Lincoln took his saddlebags
upstairs, came down with his face lit up and said, "Well,
Speed, I'm moved." A friendship, to last long, began, as

Lawyer in Springfield 105

with William Butler, clerk of the Sangamon Circuit Court,
who told Lincoln he could take his meals at the Butler home
and there would be no mention of board bills.

The circuit courtroom was in a two-story building in
Hoffman's Row, and upstairs over the courtroom was the
law office of the new firm of Stuart & Lincoln: a little room
with a few loose boards for bookshelves, an old wood stove,
a table, a chair, a bench, a buffalo robe and a small bed.
Stuart was running for Congress, so Lincoln most of the
time handled all of their law practice in range of his abil-
ity. Between law cases he kept up his political fences, writ-
ing many letters.

In the street could be seen farmers hauling corn, wheat,
potatoes and turnips in wagons; the axles creaked; husky
voices bawled at the yokes of steers while the whip thongs
lashed and cracked. Droves of hogs came past, in muddy
weather wallowing over their knees, the hair of their flanks
spattered, their curls of tails flipping as they grunted on-
ward to sale and slaughter. And there were horses, men rid-
ing and driving who loved roans, grays, whites, black horses
with white stockings, sorrels with a sorrel forelock down a
white face, bays with a white star in the forehead. To Levi
Davis, Esq., of Vandalia, Lincoln wrote on April 19, "We
have, generally in this country, peace, health, and plenty,
and no news." Yet his own peace of mind was clouded 18
days later when again he wrote Mary Owens. She would
have to be poor and show her poverty, if she married him.
He was willing to marry, if she so wished. His advice would
be not to marry. The letter read:

Springfield, May 7, 1837

Friend Mary

I have commenced two letters to send you before
this, both of which displeased me before I got half
done, and so I tore them up. The first I thought was'nt
serious enough, and the second was on the other ex-
treme. I shall send this, turn out as it may.

This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull
business after all, at least it is so to me. I am quite as

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

lonesome here as [I] ever was anywhere in my life. I
have been spoken to by but one woman since I've been
here, and should not have been by her, if she could
have avoided it. I've never been to church yet, nor
probably shall not be soon. I stay away because I am
conscious I should not know how to behave myself.

I am often thinking of what we said of your coming
to live at Springfield. I am afraid you would not be
satisfied. There is a great deal of flourishing about in
carriages here, which it would be your doom to see
without shareing in it. You would have to be poor
without the means of hiding your poverty. Do you be-
lieve you could bear that patiently? Whatever woman
may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it
is my intention to do all in my power to make her
happy and contented; and there is nothing I can im-
magine, that would make me more unhappy than to
fail in the effort. I know I shall be much happier with
you than the way I am, provided I saw no signs of dis-
content in you. What you have said to me may have
been in jest, or I may have misunderstood it. If so,
then let it be forgotten; if otherwise, I much wish you
would think seriously before you decide. For my part
I have already decided. What I have said I will most
positively abide by, provided you wish it. My opinion
is that you had better not do it. You have not been
accustomed to hardship, and it may be more severe
than you now immagine. I know you are capable of
thinking correctly on any subject; and if you delib-
erate maturely upon this, before you decide, then I am
willing to abide your decision.

You must write me a good long letter after you get
this. You have nothing else to do, and though it might
not seem interesting to you, after you had written it,
it would be a good deal of company to me in this
"busy wilderness." Tell your sister I dont want to hear
any more about selling out and moving. That gives me
the hypo whenever I think of it.

Yours, &c.

Lincoln.

Lawyer in Springfield 107

That summer Mary Owens and Lincoln saw each other
and came to no understanding. On the day they parted,
Lincoln wrote her another letter:

t Springfield, Aug. 16th, 1837

Friend Mary.

You will, no doubt, think it rather strange, that I
should write you a letter on the same day on which we
parted; and I can only account for it by supposing,
that seeing you lately makes me think of you more
than usual, while at our late meeting we had but few
expressions of thoughts. You must know that I can not
see you, or think of you, with entire indifference; and
yet it may be, that you, are mistaken in regard to what
my real feelings towards you are. If I knew you were
not, I should not trouble you with this letter. Perhaps
any other man would know enough without further in-
formation; but I consider it my peculiar right to plead
ignorance, and your bounden duty to allow the plea. I
want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so,
in all cases with women. I want, at this particular
time, more than any thing else, to do right with you,
and if I knew it would be doing right, as I rather
suspect it would, to let you alone, I would do it. And
for the purpose of making the matter as plain as pos-
sible, I now say, that you can now drop the subject,
dismiss your thoughts (if you ever had any) from me
forever, and leave this letter unanswered, without call-
ing forth one accusing murmur from me. And I will
even go further, and say, that if it will add anything to
your comfort, or peace of mind, to do so, it is my sin-
cere wish that you should. Do not understand by this,
that I wish to cut your acquaintance. I mean no such
thing. What I do wish is, that our further acquaintance
shall depend upon yourself. If such further acquaint-
ance would contribute nothing to your happiness, I
am sure it would not to mine. If you feel yourself in
any degree bound to me, I am now willing to release
you, provided you wish it; while, on the other hand, I
am willing, and even anxious to bind you faster, if I

108

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

can be convinced that it will, in any considerable de-
gree, add to your happiness. This, indeed, is the whole
question with me. Nothing would make me more mis-
erable than to believe you miserable — nothing more
happy, than to know you were so.

In what I have now said, I think I can not be mis-
understood, and to make myself understood, is the
only object of this letter.

If it suits you best to not answer this — farewell — a
long life and a merry one attend you. But if you con-
clude to write back, speak as plainly as I do. There can
be neither harm nor danger, in saying, to me, any
thing you think, just in the manner you think it.

My respects to your sister.

Your friend

Lincoln

He mentioned no memory of a kiss. He was her "friend"
rather than lover. What they had was an "acquaintance,", so
definitely no affair of passion. Months passed till the first
day of April 1838. And comedy and glee lighted him as he
wrote to Mrs. Orville H. Browning, who lived in Quincy.
The wife of a colleague in the legislature, he had found her
exceptionally gracious and understanding in conversation;
she had a sense of humor lacking in her husband. On this
April Fool's Day he confessed he had vanity, stupidity, and
had made a fool of himself:

Springfield, April 1. 1838.

Dear Madam:

Without appologising for being egotistical, I shall
make the history of so much of my own life, as has
elapsed since I saw you, the subject of this letter. And
by the way I now discover, that, in order to give you
a full and inteligible account of the things I have done
and suffered since I saw you, I shall necessarily have
to relate some that happened before.

It was, then, in the autumn of 1836, that a married
lady of my acquaintance, and who was a great friend

Lawyer in Springfield 109

of mine, being about to pay a visit to her father and
other relatives residing in Kentucky, proposed to me,
that on her return she would bring a sister of hers with
her, upon condition that I would engage to become her
brother-in-law with all convenient dispach. I, of course,
accepted the proposal; for you know I could not have
done otherwise, had I really been averse to it; but pri-
vately between you and me, I was most confoundedly
well pleased with the project. I had seen the said sister
some three years before, thought her inteligent and
agreeable, and saw no good objection to plodding
life through hand in hand with her. Time passed on,
the lady took her journey, and in due time returned,
sister in company sure enough. This stomached me a
little; for it appeared to me, that her coming so readily
showed that she was a trifle too willing; but on reflec-
tion it occured to me, that she might have been pre-
vailed on by her married sister to come, without any
thing concerning me ever having been mentioned to
her; and so I concluded that if no other objection pre-
sented itself, I would consent to wave this. All this
occured upon my hearing of her arrival in the neigh-
bourhood; for, be it remembered, I had not yet seen
her, except about three years previous, as before men-
tioned.

In a few days we had an interview, and although I
had seen her before, she did not look as my immagina-
tion had pictured her. I knew she was over-size, but
she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff ; I knew she
was called an "old maid", and I felt no doubt of the
truth of at least half of the appelation; but now, when
I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of
my mother; and this, not from withered features, for
her skin was too full of fat, to permit its contracting
in to wrinkles; but from her want of teeth, weather-
beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of no-
tion that ran in my head, that nothing could have
commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her
present bulk in less than thirtyfive or forty years; and,

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

in short, I was not all pleased with her. But what could
I do? I had told her sister that I would take her for
better or for worse; and I made a point of honor and
conscience in all things, to stick to my word, espe-
cially if others had been induced to act on it, which in
this case, I doubted not they had, for I was now fairly
convinced that no other man on earth would have her,
and hence the conclusion that they were bent on hold-
ing me to my bargain. Well, thought I, I have said it,
and, be consequences what they may, it shall not be
my fault if I fail to do it. At once I determined to
consider her my wife; and this done, all my powers of
discovery were put to the rack, in search of perfections
in her, which might be fairly set-off against her defects.
I tried to immagine she was handsome, which, but for
her unfortunate corpulency, was actually true. Exclu-
sive of this, no woman that I have ever seen, has a
finer face. I also tried to convince myself, that the
mind was much more to be valued than the person;
and in this, she was not inferior, as I could discover,
to any with whom I had been acquainted.

Shortly after this, without attempting to come to
any positive understanding with her, I set out for
Vandalia, where and when you first saw me. During
my stay there, I had letters from her, which did not
change my opinion of either her intelect or intention;
but on the contrary, confirmed it in both.

All this while, although I was fixed "firm as the
surge repelling rock" in my resolution, I found I was
continually repenting the rashness, which had led me
to make it. Through life I have been in no bondage,
either real or immaginary, from the thraldom of which
I so much desired to be free.

After my return home, I saw nothing to change my
opinion of her in any particular. She was the same and
so was I. I now spent my time between planing how I
might get along through life after my contemplated
change of circumstances should have taken place; and
how I might procrastinate the evil day for a time,

Lawyer in Springfield 111

which I really dreaded as much — perhaps more, than
an irishman does the halter.

After all my suffering upon this deeply interesting
subject, here I am, wholly unexpectedly, completely
out of the "scrape"; and I now want to know, if you
can guess how I got out of it. Out clear in every sense
of the term; no violation of word, honor or conscience.
I dont believe you can guess, and so I may as well tell
you at once. As the lawyers say, it was done in the
manner following, towit. After I had delayed the mat-
ter as long as I thought I could in honor do, which by
the way had brought me round into the last fall, I
concluded I might as well bring it to a consumation
without further delay; and so I mustered my resolu-
tion, and made the proposal to her direct; but, shock-
ing to relate, she answered, No. At first I supposed she
did it through an affectation of modesty, which I
thought but ill-become her, under the peculiar circum-
stances of her case; but on my renewal of the charge,
I found she repeled it with greater firmness than be-
fore. I tried it again and again, but with the same suc-
cess, or rather with the same want of success. I finally
was forced to give it up, at which I verry unexpectedly
found myself mortified almost beyond endurance. I
was mortified, it seemed to me, in a hundred different
ways. My vanity was deeply wounded by the reflection,
that I had so long been too stupid to discover her in-
tentions, and at the same time never doubting that I
understood them perfectly; and also, that she whom I
had taught myself to believe no body else would have,
had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness;
and to cap the whole, I then, for the first time, began
to suspect that I was really a little in love with her. But
let it all go. I'll try and out live it. Others have been
made fools of by the girls; but this can never be with
truth said of me. I most emphatically, in this instance,
made a fool of myself. I have now come to the conclu-
sion never again to think of marrying; and for this
reason; I can never be satisfied with any one who
would be block-head enough to have me.

112 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

When you receive this, write me a long yarn about
something to amuse me. Give my respects to Mr.
Browning.

Your sincere friend

A. Lincoln

The letter, like those to Miss Owens, was a self-portrait.
He named no names but his own. Mr. and Mrs. Browning
took it as the queer prank of a mind of fantasy and humor.
The Rabelaisian streak in it was one well known to those
who had heard Lincoln's storytelling. Had he named the
woman he could have had credit as a vicious gossip. He
rollicked on in the fun of having gotten out of a scrape.
And yet in this period of his life he let himself go in sar-
casm and satire that was to bring him shame and humilia-
tion. He would change. He was to learn, at cost, how to use
the qualities of pity and compassion that lay deeply and
naturally in his heart, toward wiser reading and keener
understanding of all men and women he met.

Later when Mrs. Abell visited her sister in Kentucky,
Miss Owens told neighbors that Abe Lincoln said to Mrs.
Abell, in Springfield, 'Tell your sister that I think she was
a great fool because she did not stay here and marry me."
If true, he was as baffling to them as to himself in heart
affairs.

The 18317 business panic had come, banks failing, deposi-
tors out of luck, loans called and money tight, the Sangamo
Journal saying the "groan of hard times is echoed from one
end of the country to the other." The State Bank in Spring-
field had "suspended specie payments"; you could have
folding paper money but no coin, no hard money. Gov-
ernor Duncan had called a special session of the legislature
which met July 10 in Vandalia, voted against repeal of the
$10,000,000 Internal Improvements scheme which the gov-
ernor said was "fraught with evil." Approval of banks
suspending specie payments was voted, Lincoln continu-
ously defending the Springfield bank. On watch and swift,
he was against repeated resolutions to repeal the bill mak-
ing Springfield the state capital. After two weeks he was

Lawyer in Springfield 113

back in Springfield joining in the dirtiest mud-slinging cam-
paign that Springfield politics had ever seen, "no holds
barred," many old friendships to go on the rocks.

The Whigs were running for probate judge Dr. Anson G.
Henry, egotist, orator, gadfly, peppery fighter who wel-
comed enemies. Against him was General James Adams, a
lawyer, a veteran of the War of 1812 and a minor Indian
war, 54 years old, and one of the old settlers of Springfield.
The Adams men published insinuations that Henry, as a
commissioner in the building of the new capitol, was a wild
spender of the people's money. The Whigs called public
meetings, appointed a bipartisan committee and white-
washed Henry. The Whig sheriff Garret Elkin canceled his
subscription to the new Democratic paper, the Illinois Re-
publican, because of a mean article about Dr. Henry; that
paper printed another mean article and Sheriff Elkin went
to the office of the paper and horsewhipped the editor,
George R. Weber. A brother of Weber got himself a knife,
found Elkin and a friend Daniel Cutright and managed to
sink the knife into both of them; the three involved were
arrested.

Meantime, Mrs. Joseph Anderson, a widow, had come to
Springfield to sell ten acres of land left her by her husband,
only to find General Adams claimed that the ten acres had
been signed over to him by her husband for a legal debt he
owed Adams. Stuart and Lincoln took her case. Lincoln
searched records and wrote six anonymous letters printed
weekly in the Sangamo Journal which questioned "Gen.
Adams's titles to certain tracts of land, and the manner in
which he acquired them," and how Adams got a ten-year
lease to two city lots for $10. Two days before the August
7 election a handbill, written but not signed by Lincoln,
was given out over the town. It recited a series of alleged
facts about the ten acres claimed by Mrs. Anderson and an
assignment of judgment by Anderson to Adams being
freshly handwritten in what appeared to be the handwriting
of Adams. In effect, Lincoln was publicly accusing Adams
of being a forger and swindler, this without a trial, with no
evidence heard from the accused, and witnesses cited from
only one side. It seemed Lincoln expected this handbill to

114

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

blast Adams out of politics. He guessed wrong. In the
August 7 election Adams won by 1,025 votes against 792
for Henry.

Adams now gave in the Republican a six-column reply
to Lincoln and Lincoln in a one-column reply said affidavits
offered by Adams were "all false as hell" and "I have a
character to defend as well as Gen. Adams, but I disdain to
whine about it as he does." Two weeks after election the
Sangamo Journal reprinted the pre-election handbill. In-
stead of suing Lincoln and the Journal for libel Adams
wrote another six columns for the Republican, Lincoln
seemed to have played for a libel suit, hoping he could lay
his evidence before a jury. As a final challenge to a libel
suit, the Sangamo Journal in November reprinted the pre-
election handbill with its unmistakable implication that
Adams was a forger and swindler, Adams making no an-
swer. Nor did Adams take action when an editorial sup-
posed to have been written by Lincoln was published in the
Sangamo Journal, giving a copy of an indictment found
against Adams in Oswego County, New York, in 1818, the
crime charged being forgery of a deed. "A person of evil
name and fame and of wicked disposition," was the Jour-
nals allusion to Adams.

In the course of replying to Lincoln, Adams had included
Stephen T. Logan, an able and respected lawyer, as con-
nected with Lincoln in forgery. Logan sued Adams for
libel at $10,000 damages; the case was finally dismissed on
Adams' payment of costs with a statement for the record
that he "never intended" to charge Logan with forgery. In
the courts the Stuart and Lincoln case of Mrs. Anderson
for ten acres of land never came to trial, was dropped when
Adams died; his widow and heirs got the ten acres. Through
the entire affair Lincoln showed none of the management
sagacity he had at Vandalia and little of the cool persuasive
logic, mixed with good humor, of which he was capable at
his best.

In law office routine Lincoln took depositions, drew
deeds, filed declarations, bills of complaint, praecipes, per-
haps taking an afternoon off when the famous Whig, Dan-

Lawyer in Springfield 115

iel Webster, made an hour and a half speech at a barbecue
in a grove west of town. An official of the Post Office De-
partment came one day to Springfield and asked about a
certain amount of dollars and cents that had come into the
hands of Lincoln as postmaster at New Salem. Lincoln
brought out a sack and counted the money in it, the exact
amount asked for by the inspector, who took the money,
gave a receipt, and went away satisfied. People in trouble
over land or money or love, witnesses, murderers, scandal-
mongers and slanderers, came to pour out their stories
within the walls of the Stuart and Lincoln law office. In
one of his first murder cases, Lincoln failed to save Wil-
liam Fraim, a 20-year-old, who in a drunken brawl killed
a fellow laborer; he was convicted and hanged.

On a hot summer day Harvey Ross came to prove owner-
ship of his farm at Macomb, needing the testimony of a
witness near Springfield. Court had closed, Lincoln ex-
plained, but they would go out to Judge Thomas' farm.
With a bundle of papers in one hand and in the other a red
handkerchief for wiping sweat, Lincoln with Ross and the
witness walked to the farm. The judge had gone to a tenant
house on the north part of the farm, to help his men put up
a corncrib and hog pen, said Mrs. Thomas; the main road
would be a half-mile but cutting across the cornfield from
the barn would be only a quarter-mile. They struck out
Indian file, Lincoln still with papers in one hand and red
handkerchief in the other. Arriving where the judge and
his men were raiding logs, Lincoln put the case to the judge,
who looked over the papers, swore in the witness, and, with
pen and ink from the tenant house, signed the documents.
All were in shirt sleeves, and Lincoln remarked it was a
kind of shirt-sleeve court they were holding. "Yes," laughed
the judge, "a shirt-sleeve court in a cornfield." On Lincoln
offering to roll up logs the judge guessed he could stand a
little help, so they pitched in and when Ross asked the judge
his fee the judge said he guessed their help was pay enough.

Lawyer Lincoln studied the face of Eliza Lloyd as she
told of her husband, Peter, leaving her with a newborn
baby, never furnishing support, becoming a habitual drunk-
ard and, jailed for larceny, having broken jail. Lincoln

116

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

wrote a bill of complaint "that the bonds of matrimony
heretofore and now existing between the said Peter Lloyd
and your oratrix be dissolved.'*

In a sensational murder case Stuart and Lincoln had their
hands full in many weeks of 1838. Their last captain in the
Black Hawk War, Jacob M. Early, a Democrat, had tan-
gled with Henry B. Truett, another Democrat, over a politi-
cal office. In the parlor of the Spottswood Hotel in Spring-
field they came to hot words and wild threats. On Truett
drawing a pistol, Early picked up a chair to defend himself
or to attack Truett. Truett shot Early dead. After indict-
ment of Truett, Stephen A. Douglas was appointed prose-
cuting attorney, the regular prosecutor being a witness in
the case. Assisting Stuart and Lincoln for the defense were
attorneys, all Whig, Stephen T. Logan, Edward D. Baker
and Cyrus Walker, who managed to get delays from March
14 till trial began October 9, when public feeling against
Truett had simmered down. So many people had read or
heard about the case, and formed opinions, that not till the
third day was a twelfth juror agreed on.

Logan contended that Early, a larger man than Truett,
with an upraised chair in his hands, carried a deadly
weapon, Truett believing the chair would come crashing
on his head and kill him. Prosecutor Douglas insisted
Truett came to the Spottswood Hotel with a gun, meaning
to pick a fight with Early. Lincoln's plea to the jury was
considered very effective and partly responsible for the
verdict of acquittal for Truett. Before moving actively into
the case in March, Stuart and Lincoln each accepted from
Truett a note for $250 secured by a mortgage on two sec-
tions of land. That Truett was a man of violence who liked
gunplay was a comment some years later when Truett, then
in San Francisco, fought a duel and sank a bullet in his
opponent.

In October 1837 the Reverend Jeremiah Porter was to
speak against slavery in a church. A crowd gathered, some
swearing they would mob him. Edward D. Baker cooled
the crowd down, Porter made his address, but it took more
wise handling of the crowd to get Porter out of town with
no marks on him. At a citizens meeting in the courthouse

Lawyer in Springfield 117

a few days later, Judge Thomas C. Browne in the chair,
resolutions were passed that "The doctrine of immediate
emancipation ... is at variance with Christianity," and
"abolitionists . . . are . . . dangerous members of society,
and should be shunned by all good citizens." In nearby St.
Louis a free mulatto named Mcintosh resisting arrest had
stabbed a deputy sheriff to death; a mob seized him in the
street, took him to a suburb, chained him to a tree, burned
him to death and the next morning boys threw stones at
the skull as a target.

Into nearby Alton had moved a 35-year-old abolitionist
Presbyterian minister, after editing a paper in St. Louis.
His printing press arrived on a Sunday and that night was
dumped into the Mississippi River by unknown persons.
Friendly citizens bought him another printing press which
a mob took and threw into the river, as they did a third
printing press after he had helped organize an Illinois anti-
slavery society. Word came that Ohio abolitionists were
sending him another printing press. It arrived and was
moved into a warehouse where a guard was kept. A night
mob stormed the warehouse November 7, 1837, and fail-
ing to get in, tried to set the warehouse on fire. Elijah Parish
Lovejoy rushed out to stop the attempt at arson and fell
dead from a mob bullet. His brother, Owen Lovejoy, a Con-
gregational minister, knelt at the grave and vowed "never
to forsake the cause that had been sprinkled with my
brother's blood." Lincoln over at Springfield could not
know that in years to come, amid inscrutable political
labyrinths, he and Owen Lovejoy would understand and
cling to each other, Lincoln to write, 'To the day of his
death, it would scarcely wrong any other to say, he was my
most generous friend."

In a carefully written address, "The Perpetuation of Our
Political Institutions," before the Young Men's Lyceum of
Springfield in January 1838, Lincoln's theme was the spirit
of violence in men overriding law and legal procedure. He
pointed to the men of the Revolution who, at cost of death
and mutilation, had won the liberties of men now being vio-
lated, saying, "whenever the vicious portion of population
shall be permitted to gather . . . and burn churches, ravage

118

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers,
shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at
pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Govern-
ment cannot last." It was Lincoln's masterpiece of thought
and speech up to this, his 29th year. No quotes from it could
indicate the main closely woven fabric of the address. He
dealt with momentous sacred ideas, basic in love of the
American Dream, of personal liberty and individual respon-
sibility. They were seeds in his mind foreshadowing growth.
He spoke a toleration of free discussion; even abolitionists,
keeping within the law, could have their say, a viewpoint
not agreeable to the dominant southern element of Sanga-
mon County who, if not in the listening audience, could
read the printed text in the Sangamo Journal.

Again running for the legislature in the summer of 1838,
Lincoln spent most of the campaign speaking for Stuart
who was running for Congress against Douglas. Once when
Stuart took sick, Lincoln went to Bloomington and de-
bated with Douglas. Once in Archer G. Herndon's store,
over a sloppy wet floor, Stuart and Douglas tussled and
mauled each other, "fought like wildcats." And three days
before election a Douglas speech in front of the Market
House riled the tall, supple Stuart, who got a neck hold on
the short, thick Douglas and dragged him around the
Market House. Stuart came out of it with a scar for life
where Douglas put a deep bite in his thumb. In the August
6 election Lincoln led in a field of 17 candidates. In a
total of 36,495 votes, Stuart won over Douglas by the slim
majority of 36 votes. Douglas cried for a recount but
couldn't get it.

In Vandalia in December the Whigs nominated Lincoln
for speaker of the House, and failing of election he worked
as Whig floor leader. Again his maneuvers and votes fa-
vored the Internal Improvements spending, partly because
he with others had so earnestly promised the funds for im-
provements to members who voted for Springfield as the
new capital. Vandalia still had able members trying to keep
her as the capital. Again Lincoln toiled on county reorgani-
zations, on state reapportionment, and supported the Illi-
nois and Michigan Canal. His main proposal, for the state

Lawyer in Springfield 119

to buy from the Federal Government public lands of about
20,000,000 acres at 25 cents an acre to be resold for $1.25
an acre, was approved, but came to no later results. Up till
this time state tax money had come only from land owned
by outsiders in Illinois and Lincoln voted for a new tax of
25 cents per $100 of assessed valuation on all real prop-
erty in Illinois. To one member worried about property
owners crying against the new law Lincoln said it took
from the "wealthy few" rather than the "many poor" and
definitely the wealthy few were "not sufficiently numerous
to carry the elections."

He wrote William Butler and cleared up bad feeling be-
tween Butler and Ned Baker. "Your . . . letter to him was
written while you were in a state of high excitement ... it
reached Baker while he was writhing under a severe tooth-
ache." As to Butler writing of Lincoln's bad conduct in
some piece of legislation, he wrote Butler, "I am willing to
pledge myself in black and white to cut my own throat
from ear to ear, if, when I meet you, you shall seriously
say, that you believe me capable of betraying my friends for
any price."

He wrote to Stuart as to some business or legislative mat-
ter, "Ewing wont do any thing. He is not worth a damn.
Your friend A. Lincoln." At his suggestion that the House
membership should be limited to 99 or less, another mem-
ber spoke of the Long Nine "and old women" seeming to
favor the number 9. "Now," said Lincoln, "if any woman,
old or young, ever thought there was any peculiar charm
in this distinguished specimen of number 9, I have, as yet,
been so unfortunate as not to have discovered it." After
adjournment March 4 he rode out of Vandalia with per-
haps a last backward look at the city he had helped rub off
the map as the state capital.

Back in Springfield at law practice, Lincoln wrote his
partner in Washington the news and for information

wanted, as in one letter, "a d d hawk billed yankee is

here, besetting me at every turn I take, saying that Robt
Kinzie never received the $80. to which he was entitled.
Can you tell me any thing about the matter?" On payment

120

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

of a fee, he would wrap "Stuart's half' in a piece of paper
so marked.

He had seen the convention system working well for the
Democrats and helped organize the first state Whig conven-
tion. It met in Springfield, named him one of five presiden-
tial electors for Illinois and a member of the State Central
Committee. In December he made a speech of nearly two
hours, an elaborate,- intricate financial discussion of Presi-
dent Van Buren's scheme to replace the National Bank by
a sub-treasury. He named high Democratic officials as mak-
ing fortunes out of their stealings from the Government.
"Look at Swartwout with his $1,200,000, Price with his
$75,000, Harris with his $109,000." They and others had
gone "scampering away with the public money to Texas, to
Europe," and other spots of refuge. A "running itch" was
their malady, operating "very much like the cork-leg, in the
comic song, did on its owner; which, when he had once got
started on it, the more he tried to stop it, the more it would
run away." In closing he registered an oath: "Before High
Heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidel-
ity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my
liberty and my love." In a letter to Stuart he wrote, "Well,
I made a big speech, which is in progress of printing in
pamphlet form. I shall send you a copy."

In this December, the new capitol unfinished, the Senate
met in the Methodist Church, the House in the Second Pres-
byterian Church. The Whigs had a majority of one in the
House, each party 18 members in the Senate. Lincoln served
on a committee to investigate the State Bank and signed a
report which found, in the main, little mismanagement,
though it was rated not good banking for the directors to
allow Samuel Wiggins of Cincinnati to borrow $108,000 to
pay installments on his $200,000 of bank stock, nor for the
directors to make large loans to themselves and to favored
individuals. Lincoln voted against forfeiture of the bank's
charter, which passed, and then for a new law to revive the
charter, which passed. He guided through passage a bill to
incorporate the town of Springfield into a city. His amend-
ment to the bill would make more than 12 per cent interest

Lawyer in Springfield 121

on loans illegal; it passed the House and died in the Senate,
which pleased all loan sharks.

He voted against repeal of the big Internal Improvements
Bill. This jungle of finance had by now brought the state
into debt $17,000,000 and in less than two years the state
was to stop payment of interest. Little was saved out of the
vast wreck except the Illinois and Michigan Canal which
Lincoln helped to save, and in time by able refinancing it
was made a paying project. Lincoln and others kept the
main colossal but crumbling scheme alive and Lincoln
wrote to Stuart, to no avail, asking him to try to get action
on Lincoln's plan of a previous session for the state to buy
and sell public lands at a profit.

In that session the Sangamo Journal reported that Wick-
liff Kitchell in effect accused Lincoln of being drunkenly
extravagant in favoring a bond issue of $1,500,000 to com-
plete the Illinois and Michigan Canal. "Already prostrated
by debt," said Kitchell, "that gentleman thinks it would be
for the interest of the State to go still deeper." Kitchell told
of a drunkard in Arkansas who "lost his reason" and lay
in a dumb stupor from liquor. His wife couldn't bring him
to. A neighbor came in and said "brandy toddy" might
help. The drunk sat up at the word "toddy," saying, 'That
is the stuff!" Kitchell remarked, "It is so with the gentleman
from Sangamon — more debt would be for the better."

Mr. Lincoln replied, "I beg leave to tell an anecdote. The
gentleman's course the past winter reminds me of an eccen-
tric old bachelor who lived in the Hoosier State. Like the
gentleman from Montgomery [County], he was very famous
for seeing big bugaboos in everything. He lived with an
older brother, and one day he went out hunting. His brother
heard him firing back of the field, and went out to see what
was the matter. He found him loading and firing into the
top of a tree. Not being able to discover anything in the
tree, he asked him what he was firing at. He replied a squir-
rel — and kept on firing. His brother believing there was
some humbug about the matter, examined his person, and
found on one of his eyelashes a big louse crawling about. It
is so with the gentleman from Montgomery. He imagines

122

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

he can see squirrels every day, when they are nothing but
lice" "The House," said the Sangamo Journal, "was con-
vulsed with laughter."

The national Whig convention in December 1839 nom-
inated for President William Henry Harrison of Ohio,
former Congressman and U.S. Senator, an 1812 war veteran
and above all the commander and victor in the Battle of
Tippecanoe defeating Chief Tecumseh. Nor did the Whigs
fail to tell the country, howsoever true it might be, that
Harrison lived in a plain log cabin and his drink was cider.
Little mention was made that Harrison had lost his seat in
Congress by voting against Missouri's admission to the
Union unless as a Free and not a Slave State, which had its
appeal to Lincoln as an early boomer of Harrison. Lincoln
joined in the debating tournament in Springfield that ran
eight straight evenings in December, Springfield learning,
in a way, where Whig and Democrat stood. Lincoln as a
four-time candidate for the legislature stumped his- own dis-
trict, and down into southern Illinois and over into Ken-
tucky for the national ticket, often making two-hour
speeches, at times debating with Douglas.

To a Whig conclave in Springfield in June 1840, came
15,000 people in wagons, carriages, horseback and afoot,
in log cabins hauled by oxen. Thirty yoke of oxen drew one
log cabin on wheels with live coons climbing a hickory tree
and hard cider on tap by the cabin door. Lincoln's speech
from a wagon was homely, familiar and natural, one man
who heard it saying, "One story he told well illustrated the
argument he was making. It was not an impure story, yet it
was not one it would be seemly to publish." The Illinois
Register said that on the platform he had too much of "an
assumed clownishness" and should improve his manners.

The campaign raged around the 1837 panic, Democratic
administration failures, hard times, and the Whig cry that
the Democrats had been in office too long and it was time
for a change. Feeling ran high and hot. Lincoln in March
wrote to Stuart: "Yesterday Douglas, having chosen to con-
sider himself insulted by something in the 'Journal,' under-
took to cane Francis [the editor] in the street. Francis

Lawyer in Springfield 123

caught him by the hair and jammed him back against a
market-cart, where the matter ended by Francis being
pulled away from him. The whole affair was so ludicrous
that Francis and everybody else (Douglas excepted) have
been laughing about it ever since." Lincoln and Francis
were two of five editors of a Whig paper, The Old Soldier,
A "confidential" circular in stilted language tried to warm
up every Whig party worker into personal activity, espe-
cially to see that all Whigs went to the polls. The wild cam-
paign ended with Harrison as winner, with 234 electoral
votes against Van Buren's 60, Harrison the first northern
and western man to be sent to the White House. It was a
famous campaign proving that sometimes the American
democracy goes on a rampage and shows it has swift and
terrific power, even though it is not sure what to do with
that power.

Among Illinois Whigs were regrets. They carried their
national ticket, but lost the state to the Democrats. This put
a new color on a case they were interested in. Months ear-
lier they had charged the Democrats with fraud in voting;
thousands of Irish workmen in the canal zone had started a
test action before a circuit judge who ruled that foreign-
born inhabitants must be naturalized before they could
vote. The Democrats took the case to the Supreme Court,
knowing that if they lost the case they would lose thousands
of votes.

Then came the newly elected legislature into session,
with a Democratic majority. Douglas wrote a bill which be-
came law. It set up five new supreme court judgeships; these
with the four old judges would be the supreme court of the
state besides doing the work of the circuit court judges, who
were thrown out. The bill passed the Senate by a vote of
22 to 17, and the House by a vote of 45 to 43. By this move
the Democrats saved the canal zone vote for their party,
appointed Democrats as clerks in half the counties of the
state as provided in the bill. Stephen A. Douglas, no longer
register of the land office under a Whig national administra-
tion, was appointed a Supreme Court judge. The reply of
the Whig party was a calm address issued by a committee
of which Lincoln was a member, declaring "that the inde-

124 ' THE PRAIRIE YEARS

pendence of the Judiciary has been destroyed — that here-
after our courts will be independent of the people, and
entirely dependent upon the Legislature — that our rights of
property and liberty of conscience can no longer be re-
garded as safe from the encroachments of unconstitutional
legislation."

During one session the voting was often close; when the
Democrats wanted a quorum and the Whigs didn't one day,
the Democrats locked the door of the House to keep the
quorum in. Lincoln, Joe Gillespie and another Whig raised
a window and jumped out and hid. They were laughed at
loud and long because they forgot they had voted on a mo-
tion to adjourn and by so voting had made a quorum that
counted before they had vamoosed.

Lincoln joined with Whigs and Democrats and by 70 to
1 1 votes killed a bill to give the Territory of Wisconsin the
14 northern counties of Illinois. Thus Illinois kept in its bor-
der the vital and growing Great Lakes port of Chicago.
The bright little prairie town of Galesburg in Knox County
won incorporation by 52 to 31, Lincoln voting Aye. The
session ended. An eastern visitor wrote, "The Assembly
appeared to be composed all of young men, some of them
mere boys; it forcibly reminded me of a debating school of
boy students. I was more amused than instructed." Plainly
he had missed some of the wild howling hours, and some of
the "mere boys" he saw were beginning their ride to high
place and power in the nation. In his Whig circular and
in certain long speeches Lincoln let go with overcolored
passages of a style that he later referred to as "fizzlegigs
and fireworks." He was learning.

Several days in January 1841 Lincoln was in his seat only
part of the day's session, on January 12 answering only two
of the four roll calls; then for five straight days he was ab-
sent from the legislature. A letter of January 22 to a Whig
member who had gone home had the current gossip: "We
have been very much distressed, on Mr. Lincoln's account;
hearing he had two Cat fits, and a Duck fit since we left. Is
it true?" On January 24 the lawyer James Conkling was
writing to a woman, "Poor L! how are the mighty fallen!

Lawyer in Springfield 125

He was confined about a week, but though he now appears
again he is reduced and emaciated in appearance and seems
scarcely to possess strength enough to speak above a whis-
per ... he has experienced That surely 'tis the worst of
pain To love and not be loved again.' " On January 20 Lin-
coln had written to Stuart in Washington, "I have, within
the last few days, been making a most discreditable exhi-
bition of myself in the way of hypochondriaism and thereby
got an impression that Dr. Henry [Lincoln's physician] is
necessary to my existence. Unless he gets that place [as
Springfield postmaster] he leaves Springfield." The letter
closed, "Pardon me for not writing more; I have not suffi-
cient composure to write a long letter." He had met a
woman and found his heart and mind in storm after storm.

Ninian W. Edwards of the Long Nine, a polished aristo-
crat and son of a former governor of Illinois, was the same
age as Lincoln, and they had campaigned together and
joined in Whig conferences. The Edwards' house, built of
brick, stood two stories high and could have held a dozen
prairie-farmer cabins. To this house in 1839 came a young
woman from Lexington, Kentucky. She had been there two
years before on a short visit. Now she had come to stay,
Miss Mary Todd, a younger sister of Elizabeth, the wife of
Ninian W. Edwards. Granddaughters of Todds who had
fought through the American Revolution, their father,
Robert Smith Todd, had been a captain in the War of 1812,
had been clerk of the House and a state Senator, and was
president of the Bank of Kentucky in Lexington.

Miss Mary Todd was 21, plump, swift, beaming. With
her somewhat short figure sheathed in a gown of white
with black stripes, low at the neck and giving free play to
her swift neck muscles, the skirt fluffed out in a balloonish
hoop, shod in modish ballroom slippers, she was a center of
likes and dislikes among those who came to the house of
her sister. For Lincoln, as he came to know her, she was
lighted with magnets, the first aggressively brilliant femi-
nine creature who had crossed his path so that he lost his
head. One woman remarked that he didn't go as much as
other young men for "ladies company." He saw in Matry
Todd, with her pink-rose smooth soft skin, light brown hair

126

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

hinting of bronze, ample bosom, flying glimpses of slippers,
a triumph of some kind; she had finished schools where
"the accomplishments" were taught; she spoke and read
French. She had left her home in Kentucky because of a
dispute with her stepmother. She was impetuous, picked
the ridiculous angle, the weak point of anyone she disliked
and spoke it with thrust of phrase. Her temper colored her;
she could shine with radiance at a gift, a word, an arrival,
a surprise, an achievement of a little cherished design, at
winning a withheld consent. A shaft of wanted happiness
could strike deep in her. Mary Todd was read, informed
and versed in apparel and appearance. She hummed gay
little ditties putting on a flowered bonnet and tying a double
bowknot under her chin. A satisfying rose or ostrich plume
in her hair was a psalm.

Her laughter could dimple in wreaths running to the core
of her; she was born to impulses that rode her before she
could ride them. After excesses of temper had worn her to
exhaustion, she could rise and stand up to battle again for a
purpose definitely formed. In the Edwards' circle they be-
lieved there were clues to her character in a remark she
passed at a fireside party one evening. A young woman
married to a rich man along in years was asked, "Why did
you marry such a withered-up old buck?" and answered,
"He had lots of houses and gold." And the quick-tongued
Mary Todd in surprise: "Is that true? I would rather marry
a good man, a man of mind, with a hope and bright pros-
pects ahead for position, fame, and power than to marry
all the houses, gold, and bones in the world."

In 1840 Lincoln and Mary Todd were engaged to be
married. Ninian W. Edwards and his wife had argued she
was throwing herself away; it wasn't a match; she and Lin-
coln came from different classes of society. Her stubborn
Covenanter blood rose; she knew her own mind and spoke
it; Lincoln had a future; he was her man more than any
other she had met.

The months passed. Lincoln, the solitary, the melancholy,
was busy, lost, abstracted; he couldn't go to all the parties,
dances, concerts Mary Todd was going to. She flared with
jealousy and went with other men; she accused him; tears;

Lawyer in Springfield 127

misunderstandings. They made up, fell out, made up again.
Hie wedding was set for New Year's Day, 1841.

And then something happened. The bride or the groom,
or both, broke the engagement. It was a phantom wedding,
mentioned in hushes. There was gossip and dispute about
whether the wedding had been set for that date at all. Lin-
coln was a haunted man. Was he sure he didn't love her? He
walked the streets of Springfield; he brooded, went to Dr.
Henry's office, took Dr. Henry's advice and wrote a long
statement of his case for a doctor in Louisville. And the
doctor answered that in this kind of case he could do noth-
ing without first a personal interview. Lincoln wrote his
partner Stuart: "I am now the most miserable man living.
If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human
family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth."

He was seeing Dr. Henry often, and wrote Stuart,
"Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully f or-
bode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must
die or be better, it appears to me. The matter you speak of
on my account, you may attend to as you say, unless you
shall hear of my condition forbidding it. I say this, because
I fear I shall be unable to attend to any business here, and
a change of scene might help me. If I could be myself, I
would rather remain at home with Judge Logan. I can write
no more." He begged Stuart to go the limit in Washington
toward the appointment of Dr. Henry as postmaster in
Springfield. "You know I desired Dr. Henry to have that
place when you left; I now desire it more than ever." He
added that nearly all the Whig members of the legislature
besides other Whigs favored the doctor for postmaster. On
Lincoln asking it, Stuart requested the new Secretary of
State at Washington, Daniel Webster, to appoint Lincoln
charge d'affaires at Bogota, far from Springfield, but noth-
ing came of it.

The legislature adjourned. Josh Speed was selling his store
and going back to his folks in Kentucky. Lincoln in a strug-
gle to come back traveled to Louisville in August and stay-
ing with Speed some three weeks shared talk and counsel
with that rare friend. Speed recalled Lincoln saying he had
done nothing to make any human being remember that he

128

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

had lived; he wished to live to connect his name with events
of his day and generation and to the interest of his fellow
men. Slowly, he came back. A sweet and serene old woman,
Joshua Speed's mother, talked with him, gave him a moth-
er's care, and made him a present of an Oxford Bible.

In mid-September he was in Illinois again, writing to
Speed's sister Mary about his tooth that failed of extraction
when he was in Kentucky, "Well, that same old tooth got to
paining me so much, that about a week since I had it torn
out, bringing with it a bit of the jawbone . . . my mouth is
now so sore that I can neither talk, nor eat."

Chapter 5

7 Am Going to Be Married"

Joshua Speed, deep-chested, broad between the ears, had
spots soft as May violets. And he and Abraham Lincoln
told each other their secrets about women. "I do not feel
my own sorrows much more keenly than I do yours," Lin-
coln wrote Speed in one letter. And again: "You know my
desire to befriend you is everlasting."

The wedding day of Speed and Fanny Henning had been
set; and Speed was afraid he didn't love her; it was wearing
him down; the date of the wedding loomed as the hour for
a sickly affair. He wrote Lincoln he was sick. And Lincoln
wrote what was wrong with Speed's physical and mental
system, a letter tender as loving hands swathing a feverish
forehead, yet direct in its facing of immediate facts. It was
a letter showing that Lincoln in unlucky endings of love
affairs must have known deep-rooted, tangled, and baffling
misery.

"You are naturally of a nervous temperament'* he wrote.
"And this I say from what I have seen of you personally,
and what you have told me concerning your mother at
various times, and concerning your brother William at the

"I Am Going to Be Married" 129

time his wife died." Besides this general cause, he gave
three special reasons for Speed's condition — first, exposure
to bad weather on his journey; second, "the absence of all
business and conversation of friends, which might divert
your mind, give it occasional rest from that intensity of
thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea
thread-bare, and turn it to the bitterness of death. The third
is, the rapid and near approach of that crisis on which all
your thoughts and feelings concentrate"

Lincoln's broodings over the mysteries of personality,
man's behavior, the baffling currents of body and mind, his
ideas about his own shattered physical system were indi-
cated in his telling Speed: "If ... as I expect you will at
some time, be agonized and distressed, let me, who have
some reason to speak with judgement on such a subject,
beseech you, to ascribe it to the causes I have mentioned;
and not to some false and ruinous suggestion of the Devil
. . . The general one, nervous debility, which is the key
and conductor of all the particular ones, and without which
they would be utterly harmless, though it does pertain to
you, does not pertain to one in a thousand. It is out of this,
that the painful difference between you and the mass of the
world springs." That is, Lincoln believed that he and his
friend had exceptional and sensitive personalities.

Lincoln was writing in part a personal confession in tell-
ing Speed: "I know what the painful point with you is, at
all times when you are unhappy. It is an apprehension that
you do not love her as you should. What nonsense! — How
came you to court her? Was it because you thought she de-
served it; and that you had given her reason to expect it?
If it was for that, why did not the same reason make you
court ... at least twenty others of whom you can think, &
to whom it would apply with greater force than to her?
Did you court her for her wealth? Why, you knew she had
none. But you say you reasoned yourself into it. What do
you mean by that? Was it not, that you found yourself un-
able to reason yourself out of it? Did you not think, and
partly form the purpose, of courting her the first time you
ever saw or heard of her? . . . There was nothing at that
time for reason to work upon. Whether she was moral,

130

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

amiable, sensible, or even of good character, you did not,
nor could not then know; except perhaps you might infer
the last from the company you found her in. All you then
did or could know of her, was her personal appearance and
deportment; and these, if they impress at all, impress the
heart and not the head.

"Say candidly, were not those heavenly black eyes, the
whole basis of all your early reasoning on the subject? . . .
Did you not go and take me all the way to Lexington and
back, for no other purpose but to get to see her again . . .
What earthly consideration would you take to find her
scouting and despising you, and giving herself up to an-
other? But of this you have no apprehension; and therefore
you can not bring it home to your feelings. I shall be so
anxious about you, that I want you to write me every mail."

Thus ended a letter which had begun, "My Dear Speed:
Feeling, as you know I do, the deepest solicitude for the
success of the enterprize you are engaged in, I adopt this as
the last method I can invent to aid you, in case (which God
forbid) you shall need any aid."

A few days before Speed's wedding, Lincoln wrote to the
bridegroom. "I assure you I was not much hurt by what you
wrote me of your excessively bad feeling at the time you
wrote. Not that I am less capable of sympathising with you
now than ever; . . . but because I hope and believe, that
your present anxiety and distress about her health and her
life, must and will forever banish those horid doubts, which
I know you sometimes felt, as to the truth of your affection
for her. If they can be once and forever removed, (and I
almost feel a presentiment that the Almighty has sent your
present affliction expressly for that object) surely, nothing
can come in their stead, to fill their immeasurable measure
of misery. The death scenes of those we love, are surely
painful enough; but these we are prepared to, and expect to
see. They happen to all, and all know they must happen . . .
Should she, as you fear, be destined to an early grave, it is
indeed, a great consolation to know that she is so well pre-
pared to meet it. Her religion, which you once disliked so
much, I will venture you now prize most highly."

Lincoln hoped Speed's melancholy forebodings as to

"I Am Going to Be Married" 131

Fanny's early death were not well founded. "I even hope,
that ere this reaches you, she will have returned with im-
proved and still improving health; and that you will have
met her, and forgotten the sorrows of the past, in the en-
joyment of the present. I would say more if I could; but it
seems I have said enough. It really appears to me that you
yourself ought to rejoice, and not sorrow, at this indubitable
evidence of your undying affection for her. Why Speed, if
you do not love her, although you might not wish her
death, you would most calmly be resigned to it. Perhaps
this point is no longer a question with you, and my perte-
nacious dwelling upon it, is a rude intrusion upon your
feelings . . . You know the Hell I have suffered on that
point, and how tender I am upon it. You know I do not
mean wrong. I have been quite clear of hypo [hypochon-
dria] since you left, — even better than I was along in the
fall. I have seen Sarah [Rickard] but once. She seemed
verry cheerful, and so, I said nothing to her about what we
spoke of." Speed had "kept company" with Sarah and
hoped she wasn't taking it hard that he was going to marry.

Speed's wedding day came; the knot was tied. And soon
he read lines from Lincoln at Springfield: "When this shall
reach you, you will have been Fanny's husband several
days . . . But you will always hereafter, be on ground that
I have never ocupied, and consequently, if advice were
needed, I might advise wrong. I do fondly hope, however,
that you will never again need any comfort from abroad.
But should I be mistaken in this — should excessive pleasure
still be accompanied with a painful counterpart at times,
still let me urge you, as I have ever done, to remember in
the dep[t]h and even the agony of despondency, that verry
shortly you are to feel well again. I am now fully convinced,
that you love her as ardently as you are capable of loving.
Your ever being happy in her presence, and your intense
anxiety about her health . . . would place this beyond all
dispute in my mind.

"I incline to think it probable, that your nerves will fail
you occasionally for a while; but once you get them fairly
graded now, that trouble is over forever. 1 think if I were
you, in case my mind were not exactly right, I would avoid

132

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

being idle ... If you went through the ceremony calmly
... or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm
in any present, you are safe, beyond question." A post-
script to one letter read, "I have been quite a man ever
since you left."

The single man received a letter from his just-married
friend, and wrote: "Yours of the 16th Inst, announcing that
Miss Fanny and you 'are no more twain, but one flesh,'
reached me this morning. I have no way of telling how
much happiness I wish you both; tho' I believe you both
can conceive it. I feel somwhat jealous of both of you now;
you will be so exclusively concerned for one another, that
I shall be forgotten entirely ... I regret to learn that you
have resolved to not return to Illinois. I shall be verry lone-
some without you. How miserably things seem to be ar-
ranged in this world! If we have no friends, we have no
pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them,
and be doubly pained by the loss . . ."

The Washingtonian Temperance Society was so named
because General George Washington had been a mild
drinking man who knew when to stop. Lincoln on Febru-
ary 22, 1842, at a large gathering of Washingtonians, after
riding in a carriage as "the orator of the day," gave an ad-
dress on "Charity in Temperance Reform." He pictured the
reformed drunkard as the best of temperance crusaders.
Men selling liquor, and men drinking it, were blamed too
much. Denunciation of them was both "impolitic" and
"unjust." And why? "Because, it is not much in the nature
of man to be driven to any thing; still less to be driven
about that which is exclusively his own business ... If you
would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you
are his sincere friend . . . Assume to dictate to his judg-
ment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to
be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within him-
self . . . you shall no more be able to pierce him, than to
penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw."

He sketched history, the practice of drinking "old as the
world itself." The sideboard of the parson and the ragged

'7 Am Going to Be Married" 133

pocket of the houseless loafer both held whisky. "Physicians
prescribed it in this, that, and the other disease. Govern-
ment provided it for its soldiers and sailors; and to have a
rolling or raising, a husking or hoe-down, any where with-
out it, was positively insufferable" The making of it was
regarded as honorable.

Were the benefits of temperance to be only for the next
generation, for posterity? "There is something so ludicrous
in promises of good, or threats of evil, a great way off . . .
'Better lay down that spade you're stealing, Paddy, — if you
don't you'll pay for it at the day of judgment.' 'Be the pow-
ers, if ye'll credit me so long, I'll take another, jist.' "
And proud would be the title of that land in which "there
shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard."

In the audience were reformed drunkards. Lincoln was
keyed to these men. He didn't drink, but he did wish to say,
"In my judgment, such of us as have never fallen victims,
have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than
from any mental or moral superiority over those who have."

And one young lawyer who liked his whisky stood at the
door of the Second Presbyterian Church, as the people
walked out, and reported he heard persons not pleased with
the address, catching one remark, "It's a shame that he
should be permitted to abuse us so in the house of the
Lord." The Illinois State Register inquired whether Lincoln
and other politicians had "joined the Washingtonian Society
from any other than political motives," and "Would they
have joined it if it had been exceedingly unpopular?"

Bowling Green died in this February and Lincoln went to
the funeral at New Salem. The widow, Nancy Green, who
had nursed Lincoln in sickness and fed him hot biscuits
smothered in honey, asked him to speak. He stood at the
side of the burial box, looked down at the still, white face
of his old friend, teacher and companion, turned toward the
mourners, the New Salem faces he knew so well. He may
have been composed and spoken words of comfort and
light. But one version had it that only a few broken and
choked words came from him, tears ran down his face and
he couldn't go on.

134 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

A few days after Joshua Speed's wedding, the newly
married man wrote to Lincoln that he was still haunted by
"something indescribably horrible and alarming." Lincoln's
reply February 25, 1842, gave light on his own experience
and methods of overcoming melancholy, "hypo," torment
of mind and nerves. He wrote that he opened Speed's letter
"with intense anxiety and trepidation — so much, that al-
though it turned out better than I expected, I have hardly
yet, at the distance of ten hours, become calm," and then,
"I tell you, Speed, our forebodings, for which you and I are
rather peculiar, are all the worst sort of nonsense." Lincoln
believed he could see that since Speed's last letter, Speed
had grown "less miserable" and not worse, writing: "You
say that 'something indescribably horrible and alarming
still haunts you.['] You will not say that three months from
now, I will venture. When your nerves once get steady
now, the whole trouble will be over forever. Nor should
you become impatient at their being very slow, in becoming
steady. Again; you say you much fear that that Elysium of
which you have dreamed so much, is never to be realized.
Well, if it shall not, I dare swear, it will not be the fault of
her who is now your wife. I now have no doubt that it is
the peculiar misfortune of both you and me, to dream
dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly
can realize. Far short of your dreams as you may be, no
woman could do more to realize them, than that same black
eyed Fanny. If you could but contemplate her through my
imagination, it would appear ridiculous to you, that any
one should for a moment think of being unhappy with her.
My old Father used to have a saying that 'If you make a
bad bargain, hug it the tighter.' "

This letter was confidential and for Speed only. "I write
another letter enclosing this, which you can show her, if
she desires it. I do this . . . because, she would think
strangely perhaps should you tell her that you receive no
letters from me; or, telling her you do, should refuse to
let her see them." For Speed in an earlier year, Lincoln
had recited:

"I Am Going to Be Married" 135

Whatever spiteful fools may say,
Each jealous, ranting yelper,

No woman ever went astray

Without a man to help her.

A month passed and Lincoln had news from Speed that
the marriage was a complete success and bells rang merrily,
Speed far happier than he ever expected to be. To which
Lincoln replied: "I know you too well to suppose your ex-
pectations were not, at least sometimes, extravagant; and if
the reality exceeds them all, I say, enough, dear Lord. I am
not going beyond the truth, when I tell you, that the short
space it took me to read your last letter, gave me more
pleasure, than the total sum of all I have enjoyed since that
fatal first of Jany. '41."

He referred to Mary Todd for the first time in his let-
ters to Speed. ". . . it seems to me, I should have been en-
tirely happy, but for the never-absent idea, that there is one
still unhappy whom I have contributed to make so. That
still kills my soul. I can not but reproach myself, for even
wishing to be happy while she is otherwise. She accom-
panied a large party on the Rail Road cars, to Jacksonville
last monday; and on her return, spoke, so that I heard of it,
of having enjoyed the trip exceedingly. God be praised for
that."

Three months later there came to Lincoln thanks and
thanks from Speed for what he had dqne to bring and to
keep Speed and Fanny Henning together. He wrote to
Speed: "I am not sure there was any merit, with me, in the
part I took in your difficulty; I was drawn to it as by fate
... I could not have done less than I did. I always was
superstitious; and as part of my superstition, I believe God
made me one of the instruments of bringing your Fanny
and you together, which union, I have no doubt He had
foreordained. Whatever he designs, he will do for me yet . . .
If, as you say, you have told Fanny all, I should have no
objection to her seeing this letter, but for it's reference to
our friend here. Let her seeing it, depend upon whether she

136

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

has ever known any thing of my affair; and if she has not,
do not let her."

"Our friend here" meant Mary Todd. Lincoln was now
sure he had made a mistake, first of all in not taking Speed's
advice to break off his engagement with Mary Todd, and
then in not going through and keeping his resolve to marry
her. "As to my having been displeased with your advice,
surely you know better than that. I know you do; and
therefore I will not labour to convince you. True, that sub-
ject is painfull to me; but it is not your silence, or the si-
lence of all the world that can make me forget it. I acknowl-
edge the correctness of your advice too; but before I resolve
to do the one thing or the other, I must regain my confi-
dence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are
made.

"In that ability, you know, I once prided myself as the
only, or at least the chief, gem of my character; that gem I
lost — how, and when, you too well know. I have not yet re-
gained it; and Until I do, I can not trust myself in any mat-
ter of much importance. I believe now that, had you under-
stood my case at the time, as well as I understood yours
afterwards, by the aid you would have given me, I should
have sailed through clear; but that does not now afford me
sufficient confidence, to begin 4hat, or the like of that,
again."

Such was the frank and pitiless self -revelation he did not
wish Fanny Henning Speed to see unless she knew every-
thing else. He closed his letter, "My respect and esteem to
all your friends there; and, by your permission, my love to
your Fanny." In one sentence he had sketched himself, "I
am so poor, and make so little headway in the world, that I
drop back in a month of idleness, as much as I gain in a
year's rowing."

Mrs. Simeon Francis, wife of the editor of the Sangamo
Journal, invited Lincoln to a party in her parlor, brought
Lincoln and Miss Todd together and said, "Be friends
again." Whatever of fate or woman-wit was at work, and
^whatever hesitations and broodings went on in Lincoln's

"I Am Going to Be Married" 137

heart, they were friends again. But they didn't tell the
world so.

Joining the quiet little parties in the Francis house was
Julia Jayne, who with Mary Todd, concocted articles
printed in the Sangamo Journal, Whig satires on the state
auditor of accounts, James Shields, his ways, manners and
clothes. Of four letters signed "Rebecca" Lincoln wrote one,
and it was in part overly gabby and mean, edging on malice
— and yet often comic, as in reference to a gathering: "They
wouldn't let no democrats in, for fear they'd disgust the
ladies, or scare the little galls, or dirty the floor. I looked
in at the window, and there was this same fellow Shields
floatin about on the air, without heft or earthly substance,
just like a lock of cat-fur where cats had been fightin . . .
and the sweet distress he seemed to be in,— his very fea-
tures in the exstatic agony of his soul, spoke audibly and
distinctly — 'Dear Girls, it is so distressing, but I cannot
marry you all ... it is not my fault that I am so handsome
and so interesting." This anonymous letter of Lincoln's
signed only "Rebecca," ended, "If some change for the bet-
ter is not made, its not long that neither Peggy, or I, or any
of us, will have a cow left to milk, or a calf s tail to wring."

One "Rebecca" article written by Miss Todd and Miss
Jayne read in part: "Now I want you to tell Mr. S. that
rather than fight I'll make any apology, and if he wants
personal satisfaction, let him only come here and he may
squeeze my hand . . . Jeff tells me the way these fireeaters
do is to give the challenged party choice of weapons, &c.
which bein the case I'll tell you in confidence that I never
fights with any thing but broom-sticks or hot water, or a
shovel full of coals, or some such thing . . ."

Shields, a bachelor of 32, had been a lawyer ten years
and a member of the legislature with Lincoln. He was a
fighting Irishman born in Dungannon, County Tyrone, Ire-
land. He asked the Sangamo Journal editor who wrote the
articles and was told Lincoln took all responsibility for
them. Then Shields challenged Lincoln to a duel. Lincoln's
seconds notified Shields' seconds that Lincoln chose to fight
with cavalry broadswords, across a plank ten feet long and

138

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

nine to twelve inches broad. The two parties traveled by
horse and buggy, and by an old horse-ferry, and September
22 met on a sand bar in the Mississippi River, within three
miles of Alton but located in the State of Missouri beyond
reach of the Illinois laws against dueling.

Lincoln, seated on a log, practiced swings and swishes in
the air with his cavalry broadsword, while friends, lawyers,
seconds on both sides, held a long conference. After the
main long one came shorter conferences with Lincoln and
with Shields. Then a statement was issued declaring that al-
though Mr. Lincoln was the writer of the article signed
"Rebecca" in the Sangamo Journal of September 2, he had
no intention of injuring the personal or private character or
standing of Mr. Shields as a gentleman or a man, that he
did not think that said article could produce such an ef-
fect; and had he anticipated such an effect, he would have
foreborne to write it; said article was written solely for po-
litical effect, and not to gratify any personal pique against
Mr. Shields, for he had none and knew of no cause for
any. The duel had become a joke but Lincoln never after-
ward mentioned it and his friends saw it was a sore point
that shouldn't be spoken of to him. A story arose and lived
on that when first, as the challenged party, he had his
choice of weapons, he said, "How about cow dung at five
paces?"

At the meetings of Lincoln and Mary Todd in the Fran-
cis home, Miss Todd made it clear to him that if another
date should be fixed for a wedding, it should not be set so
far in the future as it was the time before. Lincoln agreed
and early in October wrote to Speed: "You have now been
the husband of a lovely woman nearly eight months. That
you are happier now than you were the day you married her
I well know . . . and the returning elasticity of spirits which
is manifested in your letters. But I want to ask a closer
question — 'Are you now, in feeling as well as judgement,
glad you are married as you are?' From any body but me,
this would be an impudent question not to be tolerated; but
I know you will pardon it in me. Please answer it quickly

"I Am Going to Be Married" 139

as I am impatient to know." Speed answered yes and yes,
his marriage had brought happiness. A few weeks later,
Lincoln came to the room of James Matheny, before Math-
eny was out of bed, telling his friend, "I am going to be
married today."

On the street Lincoln met Ninian W. Edwards and told
Edwards that he and Mary were to be married that evening.
Edwards gave notice, "Mary is my ward, and she must be
married at my house." When Edwards asked Mary Todd if
what he had heard was true, she told him it was true and
they made the big Edwards house ready.

Lincoln took all care of a plain gold ring, the inside en-
graved: "Love is eternal." At the Edwards house on the
evening of November 4, 1842, the Reverend Charles
Dresser in canonical robes performed the ring ceremony
of the Episcopal church for the groom, 33, and the bride,
soon to be 24.

Afterward in talk about the wedding, Jim Matheny said
Lincoln had "looked as if he was going to slaughter." Gos-
sip at the Butler house where Lincoln roomed had it that,
as he was dressing, Bill Butler's boy came in and asked,
"Where are you going?" Lincoln answering, "To hell, I
suppose." However dubious such gossip, Lincoln, seven
days after his wedding, wrote to Sam Marshall at Shawnee-
town, discussed two law cases, and ended the letter: "Noth-
ing new here, except my marrying, which to me, is matter
of profound wonder."

The Lincoln couple boarded and roomed at $4.00 per *
week in the plain Globe Tavern, where their first baby
came August 1, 1843, and was named Robert Todd. Soon
after, they moved into their own home, bought for $1,500,
a story-and-a-half frame house a few blocks from the city
center. The framework and floors were oak, the laths hand-
split hickory, the doors, door frames and weatherboarding
black walnut. The house was painted, wrote one visitor, "a
Quaker tint of light brown." In the back lot were a cistern,
well and pump, a barn 30 by 13 feet, a carriage house 18
by 20. Three blocks east the cornfields began and farms
mile after mile.

140 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

•v

In the nine, and later, 15 counties of the Eighth Judicial
District or "Eighth Circuit," Lincoln traveled and tried
cases in most of the counties, though his largest practice
was in Logan, Menard, Tazewell and Woodford, which
were part of the Seventh Congressional District. He rode
a horse or drove in a buggy, at times riding on rough roads
an hour or two without passing a farmhouse on the open
prairie. Mean was the journey in the mud of spring thaws,
in the blowing sleet or snow and icy winds of winter. Heavy
clothing, blankets or buffalo robes over knees and body,
with shawl over shoulders, couldn't help the face and eyes
that had to watch the horse and the road ahead. When pelt-
ing showers or steady rain came, he might stop at a farm-
house but if court was meeting next day, there was nothing
to do but plod on in wet clothes.

The tavern bedrooms had usually only a bed, a spittoon,
two split-bottom chairs, a washstand with a bowl and a
pitcher of water, the guest in colder weather breaking the
ice to wash his face. Some taverns had big rooms where a
dozen or more lawyers slept of a night. In most of the
sleepy little towns "court day" whetted excitement over
trials to decide who would have to pay damages or go to
jail. Among the lawyers was fellowship with men of rare
brains and ability who would be heard from nationally,
some of them to be close associates of Lincoln for years.
Over the Eighth Circuit area, 120 miles long and 160 miles
wide at its limit, ranging from Springfield to the Indiana
line, Lincoln met pioneer frontier humanity at its best
and worst, from the good and wise to the silly and aimless.

With Stuart away months in Congress, and busy with
politics when at home, the heavy routine work fell on Lin-
coln, who had learned about all he could of law from Stu-
art. They parted cordially and Lincoln went into partner-
ship with Stephen T. Logan, acknowledged leader of the
Springfield bar. Nine years older than Lincoln, he was a
former circuit judge, Scotch-Irish and Kentucky-born — a
short sliver of a man with tight lips and a thin voice that
could rasp, his hair frowsy and, red. He wore linsey-woolsey
shirts, heavy shoes, and never a necktie, yet he was known
as one of the most neat, careful, scrupulous, particular,

"I Am Going to Be Married" 141

exact and profoundly learned lawyers in Illinois in prepar-
ing cases and analyzing principles involved. From him Lin-
coln was to learn more than he had known of the word
"thorough" in law practice. Perhaps slight yet definite was
the influence of Logan in Lincoln's writing later:

The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject
any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but
whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are
few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every
thing ... is an inseparable compound of the two; so
that our best judgment of the preponderance between
them is continually demanded.

Lincoln argued in the Supreme Court the famous case
of Bailey vs. Cromwell. Cromwell had sold Bailey a Negro
girl, saying the girl was a slave. Bailey had given a note
promising to pay cash for the slave. Lincoln argued, in
part, that the girl was a free person until proven to be a
slave, and, if not proven a slave, then she could not be
sold nor bought and no cash could be exchanged between
two men buying and selling her. The Supreme Court de-
cided that the "girl being free" therefore "could not be the
subject of a sale" and Bailey's promissory note was "illegal."

For Miss Eliza Cabot, a Menard County schoolteacher
suing for slander, Lincoln won a verdict for $1,600. In one
damage suit the best Lincoln could get for his client was
one cent. In June 1842 Logan and Lincoln had eight bank-
ruptcy cases in the U.S. District Court. They defended one
bankrupt client, Charles H. Chapman, charged with per-
jury, Chapman getting five years in the penitentiary, though
pardoned five months later. In such a case, it was generally
understood among fellow attorneys that if Lincoln believed
a client guilty, he" made a poor showing before judge and
jury.

Since 1839 Lincoln had traveled the circuit a few months
each year. In DeWitt County he and Douglas were joint
counsel in the defense of Spencer Turner indicted "for not
having the fear of God before his eyes but being moved and
seduced by the instigation of the Devil." Turner had as-

142

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

saulted one Matthew K. Martin with "a wooden stick of
the value of ten cents" inflicting on the right temple of the
said Martin "one mortal wound." The plea was not guilty
and the jury was convinced of Turner's innocence.

Since joining Logan, Lincoln had more cases in the
higher courts in Springfield. In December 1841 he argued
14 cases in the Supreme Court, losing only four. Of 24
cases in that court during 1842 and 1843 he lost only seven.
But Logan was taking a son into partnership, and he saw,
too, that Lincoln was about ready to head his own law firm.
And Logan, a Whig, elected a member of the legislature in
1842, had an eye on going to Congress, as did Lincoln.
The firm had, on Lincoln's advice, taken in as a law student
a young man, William H. Herndon, nine years younger
than Lincoln, who had clerked in the Speed store and
slept upstairs. Shortly after Herndon's admittance to law
practice in December 1S44, Lincoln and he formed a part-
nership and opened their office. The younger man had
spoken amazement at Lincoln's offer to take him on, Lin-
coln saying only, "Billy, I can trust you and you can trust
me." From then on for years he was "Billy" and called the
other man "Mr. Lincoln."

Herndon was intense, sensitive, had hair-trigger emo-
tions. His grandfather in Virginia had given slaves their
freedom; his father, a former store and tavern keeper, in
politics had fought to make Illinois a Slave State. The son
knew tavern life, and was near vanity about how he could
read men by their eyes. He was of medium height, raw-
boned, with high cheekbones, dark eyes set far back, his
shock of hair blue-black. He knew rough country boy talk
and stories, tavern lingo, names of drinks, the slang of men
about cards, horse races, chicken fights, women. Yet he was
full of book learning, of torches and bonfires, had a flam-
boyance about freedom, justice, humanity. He was close
to an element in Sangamon County that Lincoln termed
"the shrewd wild boys." He liked his liquor, the bars and
the topers and tipplers of the town. He was a Whig, was
plain himself and was loved by many plain people. Lincoln,
in a political letter, had referred to his own arrival in San-
gamon "twelve years ago" as "a strange[r], friendless, un-

Running for Congress 143

educated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat — at ten
dollars per month" and was now astonished "to learn that
I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth,
and arristocratic family distinction." There was a factor of
politics as well as law in his choosing for a partner the
money-honest, highf alutin, whimsical, corn-on-the-cob, tem-
peramental, convivial Bill Herndon.

Chapter 6

Running for Congress

"Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don't
want to go to Congress, I wish you as a personal friend of
mine, would tell him you have reason to believe he is mis-
taken." Thus Lincoln was writing in mid-February 1843 to
an active Whig, Richard S. Thomas. As a state party leader,
with other Whigs, he wrote in March a campaign circular,
an "Address to the People of Illinois," analyzing national
issues, favoring a tariff for revenue rather than direct taxa-
tion, the National Bank opposed by the Democrats, a state
income by sale of public lands; he warned hesitant Whigs
they must use the convention system for nominations or go
on losing to "the common enemy"; he pleaded for party
unity, writing that "he whose wisdom surpasses that of all
philosophers, has declared 'a house divided against itself
cannot stand.' "

He tried to get the Sangamon County delegates to a dis-
trict convention to endorse him for Congress, but the con-
vention had pledged them to Edward D. Baker. Born in
London, England, a Black Hawk War private, a lawyer cer-
tified in Carrollton, Illinois, once a state senator, Baker was
one of the inner circle of Springfield Whigs, a brilliant and
dramatic speaker who could shift modulations from hard
ringing steel to rose and rainbow, a stubborn fighter mov-
ing with dash and gallantry. When "Ned" Baker loved a

144

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

man or a cause, he could pour it out in lavish speech. And
Lincoln's heart went out in admiration and affection for
Ned Bake* as perhaps to no other man in Springfield.
Named a delegate to the district convention, pledged to
support Baker, Lincoln wrote to Speed, "I shall be 'fixed'
a good deal like a fellow who is made groomsman to the
man what has cut him out, and is marrying his own dear
'gal'."

At the district convention in Pekin, a third rival, John
J. Hardin, had a majority at hand for the nomination. Lin-
coln, for the sake of party unity, moved the nomination be
made unanimous. Tall, well-tailored, having an air of com-
mand, a Transylvania University graduate, Hardin had
been Lincoln's rival for Whig floor leadership in the legis-
lature. In speech he stammered but had an ease and grace
about it so no one minded. The Kentucky son of a distin-
guished U.S. Senator, a Black Hawk War veteran, a briga-
dier general of state militia, he had a paying law practice
in Jacksonville and an ever-keen eye for a seat in Congress.

Lincoln engineered passage of a resolution by 18 votes to
14, whereby the convention, as individuals, recommended
E. D. Baker as the Whig party nominee for Congress in
1844, subject to the decision of the convention then. It
seemed that Lincoln, with Baker and Hardin, had made
an arrangement that Baker would follow Hardin in 1844 as
the nominee and Lincoln would follow Baker in 1846. Lin-
coln was later to remind Hardin of "the proposition made
by me to you and Baker, that we should take a turn a
piece." Hardin would claim the purpose of the resolution
was "to soothe Baker's mortified feelings," Lincoln being
certain that was not "the sole" object. Some delegates came
away understanding that three Whig leaders had agreed on
a rotation, "a turn a piece" in Congress.

Lincoln pledged himself to party harmony and when
Hardin won his seat in Congress at the August election,
Sangamon County gave him three times the majority of his
own Morgan County. Nevertheless, when Lincoln voted
August 7 he spoke out the names of only two candidates,
constable and justice of the peace. Why he didn't vote for
Hardin for Congress, nor for, nor against, any Whig can-

Running for Congress 145

didates for the county offices, had no explanation from
him. It was the more odd because in Whig circulars he had
strictly urged all Whigs to go to the polls and vote for all
Whigs. Possibly the election clerks were slovenly incom-
plete in recording what they heard. If he failed to vote for
Hardin, it went unnoticed by opponents or rivals who could
have used it against him. Hardin went to Congress, fol-
lowed the Whig party line, and in 1844 stepped aside and
let Baker have nomination and election.

Early in the 1844 presidential campaign, after bloody
riots in Philadelphia, and Democratic forces blaming Whigs
as wishing hate and violence toward "foreigners and Cath-
olics," Lincoln at a public meeting in Springfield moved
passage of resolutions he had written, "That the guarantee
of the rights of conscience, as found in our Constitution, is
most sacred and inviolable, and one that belongs no less
to the Catholic, than to the Protestant; and that all attempts
to abridge or interfere with these rights, either of Catholic
or Protestant, directly or indirectly . . . shall ever have
our most effective opposition." In late October he spoke in
Indiana for the national ticket and Henry Clay, the third-
time Whig candidate for President. Election Day found
him in Gentryville, Indiana. In this November, James K.
Polk of Tennessee won by 170 electoral votes over 105 for
Clay,^iis Illinois majority 12,000.

When Baker came back from Washington, he hesitated
about telling Lincoln he wouldn't run again, because of the
chance Hardin might run and they both might lose out.
Soon after, however, he told Lincoln that he would decline
nomination — and when the next year another baby boy ar-
rived at the Lincoln home, he was named Edward Baker
Lincoln.

As Lincoln had feared and foreseen, Hardin wanted to
run again. On January 7, 1846, Lincoln wrote Dr. Robert
Boal, a party worker in Marshall County, "Since I saw
you last fall ... All has happenned as I then told you I
expected it would — Baker's declining, Hardin's taking the
track, and so on. If Hardin and I stood precisely equal —
that is, if neither of us had been to congress, or if we both

146

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

had — it would only accord with what I have always done,
for the sake of peace, to give way to him; and I expect I
should do it . . . But to yield to Hardin under present cir-
cumstances, seems to me as nothing else than yielding to
one who would gladly sacrifice me altogether. This, I would
rather not submit to. That Hardin is talented, energetic,
usually generous and magnanimous, I have, before this,
affirmed to you, and do not now deny. You know that my
only argument is that turn about is fair play.' This he,
practically at least, denies." When Hardin later saw county
delegations moving toward Lincoln, he proposed that in-
stead of nominating by convention the Whigs should poll
the counties of the district, with no candidate allowed to
electioneer outside his own county. Lincoln wrote to Har-
din, "I am entirely satisfied with the old system under
which you and Baker were successively nominated and
elected to congress; and because the whigs of the District
are well acquainted with that system."

At his office desk Lincoln dipped his goose-quill pen into
an inkstand and wrote to editors, politicians, voters, pre-
cinct workers, saying in one letter, "I have . . . written to
three or four of the most active whigs in each precinct of
the county." He reckoned, in one letter, the counties for or
against his nomination. A movement against him on foot
in a town, he wrote the editor of the paper there, "I want
you to let nothing prevent your getting an article in your
paper, of this week." He could appeal frankly, "If your
feelings towards me are the same as when I saw you (which
I have no reason to doubt) I wish you would let nothing
appear in your paper which may opperate against me. You
understand. Matters stand just as they did when I saw you."

The blunt little sentence crept in often, "You under-
stand." Some letters ended, "Confidential of course," or
"Dont speak of this, lest they hear of it," or "For your eye
only." There were times to travel in soft shoes. "It is my in-
tention to take a quiet trip through the towns and neigh-
bourhoods of Logan county, Delevan, Tremont, and on to
& through the upper counties. Dont speak of this, or let it
relax any of your vigilance. When I shall reach Tremont,
we will talk every thing over at large." A direct personal

Running for Congress 147

appeal was phrased, "I now wish to say to you that if it
be consistent with your feelings, you would set a few stakes
for me." No personal feelings against Hardin must be per-
mitted. "I do not certainly know, but I strongly suspect,
that Genl. Hardin wishes to run again. I know of no argu-
ment to give me a preference over him, unless it be Turn
about is fair play.' " And again, to another: "It is my inten-
tion to give him [Hardin] the trial, unless clouds should
rise, which are not yet discernable. This determination you
need not however, as yet, announce in your paper— at least
not as coming from me ... In doing this, let nothing be said
against Hardin — nothing deserves to be said against him.
Let the pith of the whole argument be 'Turn about is fair
play. f "

Hardin began to feel outguessed and outplayed and
wrote to Lincoln complaining. Lincoln, on February 7,
1846, answered with the longest political letter he had ever
written, a masterpiece of merciless logic. Point by point he
cornered Hardin, writing at its close, "In my letter to you,
I reminded you that you had first at Washington, and after-
wards at Pekin, said to me that if Baker succeeded he
would most likely hang on as long as possible, while with
you it would be different." Hardin's letter to him imputed
"management," "manoevering," "combination" and had
the reproach, "It is mortifying to discover that those with
whom I have long acted & from whom I expected a differ-
ent course, have considered it all fair to prevent my nomi-
nation to congress." Under such imputations, wrote Lin-
coln, "It is somewhat difficult to be patient." He ended, "I
believe you do not mean to be unjust, or ungenerous; and
I, therefore am slow to believe that you will not yet think
better and think differently of this matter." Nine days later
Hardin drew out of the contest, and the district convention
at Petersburg, May 1, by acclamation nominated Lincoln
for Congress in the one district in Illinois more certain than
any other of Whig victory.

Against Lincoln the Democrats put up Peter Cartwright,
a famous and rugged old-fashioned circuit rider, a storm-
ing evangelist, exhorter and Jackson Democrat* He had
carried his Bible and rifle over wilderness, had more than

148

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

once personally thrown out of church a drunk interrupting
his sermon. He was thick-set, round-faced, and liked to
refer to his wickedness at horse racing, card playing and
dancing before he was converted. He was 61 and Lincoln
37, both of them very human. He had lived near New
Salem, held camp meetings near there, and Lincoln had
seen him and heard of his ways. A deacon spoke a cold, pre-
cise, correct prayer and Cartwright had to say, "Brother,
three prayers like that would freeze hell over." When a
presiding elder at a church meeting in Tennessee whispered
to Cartwright, pointing out a visitor, "That's Andrew Jack-
son," the reply was: "And who's Andrew Jackson? If he's
a sinner God'll damn him the same as he would a Guinea
nigger."

Cartwright's men kept reports going: Lincoln's wife was
a high-toned Episcopalian; Lincoln held drunkards as good
as Christians and church members; Lincoln was a "deist"
who believed in God but did not accept Christ nor the doc-
trines of atonement and punishment; Lincoln said, "Christ
was a bastard." Lincoln put out a handbill giving the most
complete and specific statement he had ever made publicly
regarding his religion. It read:

A charge having got intp circulation in some of the
neighborhoods of this District, in substance that I am
an open scoffer at Christianity, I have by the advice
of some friends concluded to notice the subject in this
form. That I am not a member of any Christian
Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of
the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with inten-
tional disrespect of religion in general, or of any de-
nomination of Christians in particular. It is true that in
early life I was inclined to believe in what I understand
is called the "Doctrine of Necessity" — that is, that the
human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by
some power, over which the mind itself has no control;
and I have sometimes (with one, two or three, but
never publicly) tried to maintain tins opinion in argu-
ment. The habit of arguing thus however, I have, en-
tirely left off for more than five years. And I add here,

Running for Congress 149

I have always understood this same opinion to be held
by several of the Christian denominations. The fore-
going, is the whole truth, briefly stated, in relation to
myself, upon this subject.

I do not think I could myself, be brought to support
a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy
of, and scoffer at, religion. Leaving the higher matter
of eternal consequences, between him and his Maker,
I still do not think any man has the right thus to in-
sult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the com-
munity in which he may live. If, then, I was guilty of
such conduct, I should blame no man who should con-
demn me for it; but I do blame those, whoever they
may be, who falsely put such a charge in circulation
against me.

He went to a religious meeting where Cartwright in due
time said, "All who desire to give their hearts to God, and
go to heaven, will stand." A sprinkling of men, women and
children stood up. The preacher exhorted, "All who do not
wish to go to hell will stand." All stood up — except Lin-
coln. Then Cartwright in his gravest voice: "I observe that
many responded to the first invitation to give their hearts
to God and go to heaven. And I further observe that all of
you save one indicated that you did not desire to go to hell.
The sole exception is Mr. Lincoln, who did not respond
to either invitation. May I inquire of you, Mr. Lincoln,
where you are going?"

Lincoln slowly rose: "I came here as a respectful lis-
tener. I did not know that I was to be singled out by Brother
Cartwright. I believe in treating religious matters with due
solemnity. I admit that the questions propounded by
Brother Cartwright are of great importance. I did not feel
called upon to answer as the rest did. Brother Cartwright
asks me directly where I am going. I desire to reply with
equal directness: I am going to Congress." Thus it was told.

Whig friends raised $200 for his personal campaign ex-
penses. After the election he handed them back $199.25,
saying he had spent only 75 cents in the campaign. The
count of ballots gave Lincoln 6,340 votes, Cartwright

150

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

4,829, Walcott (Abolitionist) 249. He wrote to Speed,
"Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to
our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much
as I expected."

Eleven days after Lincoln's nomination in May, Con-
gress had declared a state of war between the United States
and Mexico, authorizing an army of 50,000 volunteers and
a war fund of $10,000,000 to be raised. In speeches Lin-
coln seemed briefly to advise all citizens to stand by the
flag of the nation, supply all needs of the brave men at the
fighting fronts, till an honorable peace could be secured.
Trained rifle companies of young men offered service; of
8,370 volunteers in Illinois only 3,720 could be taken; they
went down the Mississippi, across the Gulf to Texas, and
on into baking hot deserts of Mexico.

Hardin enlisted and was appointed a colonel; he was to
die a soldier of valor leading his men in the Battle of Buena
Vista. James Shields was appointed brigadier general to
command the Illinois troops and was to fall with a bullet
through his lungs, leading a charge in the Battle of Cerro
Gordo. Many of the young men wild to enlist had heard
since 1836 of the Alamo, of San Jacinto, of almost incred-
ibly heroic Texans against heavy odds overwhelming Mex-
ican armies and winning independence for the Republic of
Texas. The war now declared was, in part, for the bound-
ary claimed by Texas, the Rio Grande.

Lincoln "never was much interested in the Texas ques-
tion," as he wrote in October 1845, seemed only dimly
aware of a variety of irrresistible American forces acting
by fact and dream. The fact was that Texas, New Mexico
and California were passionately wanted in the domain of
the United States because of the immense land and wealth
foreseen in them. The dream was of "an ocean-bound re-
public," and America "from sea to sea." A Democratic edi-
tor saw this surge as Manifest Destiny; nothing could stop
it. When Congress in March 1845 had passed resolutions
to annex Texas, and a Texas convention in June was unani-
mous for joining the Union of States, the Mexican govern-
ment warned that Texas was still a Mexican province. The
Mexican Congress had voted $4,000,000 for war against

Running for Congress 151

Texas. President Polk ordered American troops in "pro-
tective occupation" on a strip of land in dispute at the Rio
Grande. The inevitable clashes came — and the all-out war
was on. Though the Americans were outnumbered four to
one in nearly all actions, they had better cannon, riflemen
and strategy. The battles ended September 14, 1847, when
Mexico City was taken. The two outstanding generals, Win-
field S. Scott and Zachary Taylor, were both Whigs. Texas,
New Mexico and California came into the U.S. domain.
The long and bitter dispute with Great Britain over the
Oregon boundary, bringing war threats on both sides, was
settled by Polk backing down from the cry of "54° 40' or
fight" to 49°. So there was Manifest Destiny, "America
from sea to sea" — the cost high in money and lives.

Lincoln saw more shame than glory in the political steps
and procedures involved. In June 1846 he had seen Ned
Baker return from Washington to raise an Illinois regi-
ment, and start for Mexico, where he led Shields' brigade
when Shields fell wounded. He had heard of Baker going
to Washington the following December and ending a speech
to Congress two days before he resigned his seat: "There
are in the American Army many who strongly doubt the
propriety of the war, and especially the manner of its com-
mencement; who yet are ready to pour out their hearts' best
blood, and their lives with it, on a foreign shore, in defense
of the American flag and American glory." This, for Lin-
coln, was the Whig party policy and the music of the hour.
He studied the passionate words of Senator Thomas Cor-
win, "If I were a Mexican, I would tell you, 'Have you not
room in your own country to bury your dead men? If you
come into mine, we will greet you with bloody hands and
welcome you to hospitable graves.' "

Chicago was a four-day stage trip and Lincoln arrived
in that city of 16,000 in July 1847, one of hundreds of dele-
gates to the River and Harbor Convention, run by Whigs,
and aimed to promote internal improvements and to re-
buke laxity of the Polk administration. Thousands of out-
of-town spectators, finding hotels and rooming houses over-
crowded, slept on lake ships or camped in the streets, to be

152 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

on hand in the morning in the big tent to see and hear
famous men from all over the country. Here Lincoln met
Tom Corwin of Ohio, Edward Bates and Thomas Hart
Benton of Missouri, and Thurlow Weed, a Whig party boss
in New York State. The notable New York lawyer David
Dudley Field, spoke against certain internal improvements
as unconstitutional; Horace Greeley wrote to his New
York Tribune that "Hon. Abraham Lincoln, a tall specimen
of an Illinoisan . . . was called out, and spoke briefly and
happily." Some delegates remembered Lincoln answered
Field's objection to federal improvement of the Illinois
River because it ran through only one state, by asking
through how many states the federally improved Hudson
River ran.

Lincoln had his first look at mighty Lake Michigan, blue
water moving on to meet the sky, a path for ship transport
of wheat to New York and Europe. Farmers and wheat-
buyers were hauling wheat to Chicago from 250 miles away;
lines of 10 to 20 wagons headed for Chicago were common.
Lincoln had no regrets over his long efforts for the canal to
connect the Illinois River and Lake Michigan.

Lincoln's term in Congress was to start in December
1847; he went on riding the Eighth Circuit, driving a rat-
tletrap buggy or on horseback, sometimes perhaps as he
tied his horse to a hitching post, hearing a voice across the
street, "That's the new Congressman Lincoln." It was a
horsey country of horsey men. They spoke of one-horse
towns, lawyers, doctors. They tied their horses to hitching
posts half -chewed away by horse teeth. They brushed horse
hair from their clothes after a drive. They carried feed bags
of oats and spliced broken tugs with rope to last till they
reached a harness shop.

His yearly income ranged from $1,200 to $1,500, com-
paring nicely with the governor's yearly $1,200 and a cir-
cuit judge's $750. By now he had probably paid the last
of his personal "National Debt." An incomplete fee book
of Lincoln and Herndon for 1845-47 showed fees from
$3.00 to $100, most entries $10. Sometimes groceries and
farm produce were accepted for fees. Lincoln was known to

— —

— , —

Upper right: Photograph
made in Chicago in 1 854 at 12
North Wells Street. Original
presented to Chicago Histori-
cal Society by George Schnei-
der. Lower left: Early photo-
graph of Mary Todd Lincoln
(CS). Lower right: Stephen
Arnold Douglas, powerful,
dramatic political opponent
of Lincoln for many years
(Meserve).

A

Nil

THE RAIL.

THAT OLD ABE SPLIT.

TM» i« the; rail

That Old Abe split.

Thl* In THE FENCE

That tu nasde with

The Bail that Old Abe split.

Thi* im THE FIELD

Tlil« l« THE ROAD

__ through thoFieW.
by too Fence,
-made with
Rail that Old Abe split.

Thi* 1* THE TEAM

Tb*t traveled the Road.
That peeved through the Field,
Enclosed by the Fence,
That wia medo with

The Bail that Old Abe split.

This* wfir.trHB HO
That

_ _/ the . _
That was made with

The Rail that Old Abe split

PITT8BUR0H FLAG M AN U FACT ORY, 45 FJ EJjt^xltf CT
j from 5 locbet to K> fwi. t—*- * T - *

A republican broadside, campaign of I 860.

" — ; -

Upper left: Brady photograph made in Washington nine
days before inauguration, 1861 (Meserve). Upper right:
Inauguration crowd before the unfinished Capitol, March 4,
1861 (Meserve). Lower, left to right: Edwin McMasters
Stanton of Ohio, second Secretary of War (CS), Simon
Cameron of Pennsylvania, first Secretary of War (CS), Gid-
eon Welles of Connecticut, Secretary of the Navy, diarist ex-
traordinary (USASC), Salmon Portland Chase of Ohio,
Secretary of the Treasury, constant Presidential aspirant
(CS).

confederate generals. Upper left: Robert Edward Lee
(Library of Congress). Upper right: Early photograph of
Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson (CS). Lower, left to
right: Joseph E. Johnston (Meserve). Nathan Bedford For-
rest (Meserve). J.E.B. ("Jeb") Stuart (Meserve). James
Longstreet (Meserve),

■■ . ■ .

r

union generals. t/pp<?r te/f: William Tecumseh Sherman
(Meserve) . Upper right; Ulysses Simpson Grant ( Meserve) .
Lower, left to right; George Gordon Meade (CS), Joseph
Hooker (CS), Ambrose E. Burnside (Meserve), Henry W.
Halleck (Meserve).

Upper left: Jefferson Davis, President
of the Confederate States of America,
former Senator from Mississippi and
Mexican War veteran (McClees). Up-
per center: Alexander Stephens of
Georgia, Vice-President of the CSA, in-
timate with Lincoln when they were
members of Congress (USASC). Up-
per right: William Lowndes Yancey,
"fire-eater" orator who led Alabama
into secession (Meserve). Center:
Christopher Gustavus Memminger of
South Carolina, Wurttemburg born,
Secretary of the Treasury of the CSA
(Meserve). Lower left: John C. Breck-
inridge, resigned U.S. Senator from
Kentucky, Confederate general, later
Secretary of War of the CSA (Me-
serve).

Upper: Photograph by
Alexander Gardner, No-
vember 15, 1863, four
days before the Gettysburg
speech. Stern, austere, one
of the most popular por-
traits of Lincoln (Me-
serve). Lower: Lincoln,
troubled about McClel-
land "slows," pays a sur-
prise visit to the Army of
the Potomac Commander
in October, 1862 (Me-
serve).

Upper left: Union infantry
rank and file (USASC). Up-
per right: Confederate rank
and file troopers captured at
Gettysburg (CS). Center; Es-
caped slaves, "contrabands, 1 '
outfitted for Labor inside Un-
ion lines (CS). Lower: Union
officers and privates (CS).

Upper: Lincoln's private secretaries, John Hay (left) and
John G. Nicolay (right), who accompanied the President-
elect to Washington and were White House residents (Me-
serve). Upper right: Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, elected
Vice-President 1864 (USASC).

Lower, left to right: Charles Sumner, Boston antislavery
aristocrat, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts (CS); John C.
Fremont, explorer, California millionaire rancher, Major
General, politician constantly at odds with Lincoln (Me-
serve); Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, Congressman
and violent opponent of Lincoln (McClees).

The Last Photographs of Lin-
coln By Alexander Gardner,
April 10, 1865, the day after
Lee's surrender at Appomat-
tox. Tad is shown with his
father, upper left (Meserve).

Running for Congress 161

taller than average, except for his knees rising above the
chair's seat level.

When at home in Springfield, he cut wood, tended to the
house stoves, curried his horse, milked the cow. Lincoln's
words might have a wilderness air and log-cabin smack, the
word "idea" more like "idee," and "really" a drawled Ken-
tucky "ra-a-ly." He sang hardly at all but his voice had
clear and appealing modulations in his speeches; in rare
moments it rose to a startling and unforgettable high treble
giving every syllable unmistakable meaning. In stoop of
shoulders and a forward bend of his head there was a grace
and familiarity making it easy for shorter people to look
up into his face and talk with him.

In a criminal case Lincoln agreed with Usher F. Linder
that each should make the longest speech he could, talking
till he was used up. And, as Linder told it, Lincoln "ran
out of wind" at the end of an hour, while he, Linder, ram-
bled on three hours to the jury.

When Martin Van Buren stopped overnight in Rochester,
friends took along Lincoln to entertain the former Presi-
dent. Van Buren said of the evening that his sides were
sore from laughing. Lincoln might have told of the man
selling a horse he guaranteed "sound of skin and skeleton
and free from faults and faculties." Or the judge who, try-
ing to be kindly, asked a convicted murderer, politically
allied to him, "When would you like to be hung?" Or the
lawyer jabbing at a hostile witness who had one large ear:
"If he bit off the other ear he would look more like a man
than a jackass." Or of the old man with whiskers so long
it was said of him when he traveled, "His whiskers arrive
a day in advance." Or of Abram Bale, the tall and power-
ful-voiced preacher from Kentucky, who, baptizing new
converts in the Sangamon River, was leading a sister into
the water, when her husband, watching from the bank,
cried out: "Hold on, Bale! Hold on, Bale! Don't you drown
her. I wouldn't take the best cow and calf in Menard
County for her."

Once in a courthouse, Lincoln rattled off a lingo chang-
ing letters of words, so that "cotton patch" became "potten
catch" and "jackass" became "jassack," giving tricky twists

162 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

to barnyard and tavern words. The court clerk asked Lin-
coln to write it out and took special care for years of the
paper on which Lincoln scribbled verbal nonsense. The
Illinois State Register termed him a "long-legged varmint"
and "our jester and mountebank." A client seeing Lincoln
with one leg on the office desk, said, "That's the longest
leg I've ever seen in this country." Lincoln lifted the other
leg to the desk, and, "Here's another one just like it." Or
so it was told.

In the small clique of Springfield Whigs who had come to
wield party controls, the opposition dubbed Lincoln the
"Goliath of the Junto." On streets, in crowds or gatherings,
Lincoln's tall frame stood out. He was noticed, pointed out,
questions asked about him. He couldn't slide into any group
of standing people without all eyes finding he was there.
His head surmounting a group was gaunt and strange, on-
lookers remembering the high cheekbones, deep eye sock-
ets, the coarse black hair bushy and tangled, the nose large
and well shaped, the wide full-lipped mouth of many subtle
changes from straight face to wide beaming smile. He was
loose-jointed and comic with appeals in street-corner slang
and dialect from the public square hitching posts; yet at
moments he was as strange and far-off as the last dark
sands of a red sunset, solemn as naked facts of death and
hunger. He was a seeker. Among others and deep in his
own inner self, he was a seeker.

Leasing his Springfield house for a yearly rental of $90,
"the North-upstairs room" reserved for furniture storage,
Lincoln on October 25, 1847, with wife, four-year-old
Robert and 19-month-old Eddie, took stage for St. Louis,
and after a week of steamboat and rail travel, arrived in
Lexington, Kentucky. There relatives and friends could see
Mary Todd Lincoln and her Congressman husband she
took pride in showing. They stayed three weeks. Lincoln
saw the cotton mills of Oldham, Todd & Company, worked
by slave labor, driving out with his brother-in-law, Levi
Todd, assistant manager.

He got the feel of a steadily growing antislavery move-
ment in Kentucky. He saw slaves auctioned, saw them

Running for Congress 163

chained in gangs heading south to cotton fields, heard omi-
nous news like that of "Cassily," a slave girl, under indict-
ment for "mixing an ounce of pounded glass with gravy"
and giving it to her master, John Hamilton, and his wife
Martha. He had heard of the auction sale in Lexington of
Eliza, a beautiful girl with dark lustrous eyes, straight black
hair, rich olive complexion, only one sixty-fourth African,
white yet a slave. A young Methodist minister, Calvin
Fairbank, bid higher and higher against a thick-necked
Frenchman from New Orleans. Reaching $1,200, the
Frenchman asked, "How high are you going?" and Fair-
bank, "Higher than you, Monsieur*" The bids rose to
where Fairbank said slowly, "One thousand, four hundred
and fifty dollars." Seeing the Frenchman hesitating, the
sweating auctioneer pulled Eliza's dress back from her
shoulders, showing her neck and breasts, and cried, "Who
is going to lose a chance like this?" To the Frenchman's
bid of $1,465, the minister bid $1,475. Hearing no more
bids, the auctioneer shocked the crowd by "lifting her
skirts" to "bare her body from feet to waist," and slapping
her thigh as he called, "Who is going to be the winner of
this prize?" Over the mutter and tumult of the crowd came
the Frenchman's slow bid of "One thousand, five hundred
and eighty dollars." The auctioneer lifted his gavel, called
"one-two-three." Eliza turned a pained and piteous face
toward Fairbank, who now bid "One thousand, five hundred
and eighty-five." The auctioneer: "I'm going to sell this
girl. Are you going to bid?" The Frenchman shook his
head. Eliza fell in a faint. The auctioneer to Fairbank:
"You've got her damned cheap, sir. What are you going to
do with her?" And Fairbank cried, "Free her!" Most of
the crowd shouted and yelled in glee. Fairbank was there
by arrangement with Salmon P. Chase and Nicholas Long-
worth of Cincinnati, who had authorized him to bid as
high as $25,000. Fairbank had since gone to the peniten-
tiary for other antislavery activity and in his life was to
serve 17 years behind bars.

Lincoln saw in the Todd and other homes the Negro
house servants, their need to be clean, their handling of
food and linen, the chasm between them and Negro field

164

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

hands who lived in "quarters." He read books in the big
library of Robert Todd, went to many parties and in the
capital city of Kentucky met leading figures of the state and
nation. He heard Henry Clay on November 13 before an
immense audience: "Autumn has come, and the season of
flowers has passed away ... I too am in the autumn of
life, and feel the frost of age," terming the Mexican War
one of "unnecessary and offensive aggression," holding, "It
is Mexico that is defending her firesides, her castles and her
altars, not we." For the United States to take over Mexico
and govern it, as some were urging, Clay saw as impossible,
and there would be danger in acquiring a new area into
which slavery could move.

Chapter 7

Congressman Lincoln

By stage and rail the Lincoln family traveled seven days to
arrive in Washington December 2, staying at Brown's Ho-
tel, then moving to Mrs. Sprigg's boardinghouse on ground
where later the Library of Congress was built. They saw a
planned city with wide intersecting streets, squares, parks,
a few noble buildings on spacious lawns, yet nearly every-
where a look of the unfinished, particularly the Capitol with
its dark wooden dome, its two wings yet to be built. Cobble-
stoned Pennsylvania Avenue ran wide from the Capitol to
the White House yet a heavy rain on Polk's inauguration
day brought mudholes where parading soldiers slipped and
sprawled.

Here lived 40,000 people, among them 8,000 free Ne-
groes and 2,000 slaves. Here were mansions and slums;
cowsheds, hog pens and privies in back yards; hogs, geese
and chickens roving streets and alleys. Sidewalks were
mostly of gravel or ashes. Thirty-seven churches of varied
faiths, competed with out-numbering saloons, card and dice

Congressman Lincoln 165

joints, houses where women and girls aimed to please male
customers. Ragged slaves drove produce wagons; gangs of
slaves sold or to be sold at times moved in chains along
streets. Lincoln saw a jail near the Capitol which he was
to term "a sort of negro livery-stable," where Negroes were
kept to be taken south "precisely like a drove of horses."
Yet here too were libraries, museums, fountains, gardens,
halls and offices where historic and momentous decisions
were made, ceremonials, receptions, balls, occasions of state
and grandeur, and all the dialects of America from Louisi-
ana to Maine, the Southern drawl, the Yankee nasal twang,
the differing western slang.

Lincoln liked Mrs. Sprigg's place, the lodgings and meals,
the Whig anti-slavery members of Congress who ate there,
especially the abolitionist war horse from Ohio, Joshua R.
Giddings. When Lincoln couldn't referee a table dispute,
he could usually break it up with an odd story that had
point. But Mrs. Lincoln couldn't find company, attractions,
women, social events of interest to her, and with her hus-
band one of the busiest men in Congress, missing only
seven roll calls in the long session that was opening, after
three months of it she traveled with the two boys to her
father's home in Lexington.

In the Hall of Representatives, after the oath of office,
Lincoln drew a seat in the back row of the Whig side.
Many faces and names in the House and over in the Sen-
ate became part of him, part of his life then and in years
after. George Ashmun, John G. Palfrey and Robert Win-
throp of Massachusetts, John Minor Botts of Virginia,
Howell Cobb and Alexander Stephens of Georgia, Andrew
Johnson of Tennessee, Robert C. Schenck of Ohio, Caleb
B. Smith of Indiana, Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, David
Wilmot of Pennsylvania — Lincoln could have no dim fore-
vision of the events and tumults where those men would
be joined or tangled with him.

He could see at one desk a little man with delicate side-
burns, a mouth both sweet and severe. Eighty years old, this
man had been professor of rhetoric at Harvard, U.S. Sena-
tor from Massachusetts, President of the United States
from 1825 to 1829, after which he was in Congress for 17

166

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

years. In the foreign service in Paris he had seen Napoleon
return from Elba. This was John Quincy Adams, one of
the foremost and fiery Whigs to cry that the war with Mex-
ico was instigated by slaveholders for the extension of slave
territory. Over in the Senate Lincoln could see the Illinois
wonder boy who had had two terms in the House, had been
elected to a third, but resigned before taking his seat to
start his first term in the upper chamber. Stephen A. Doug-
las quoted Frederick the Great, "Take possession first and
negotiate afterward," and declared, "That is precisely what
President Polk has done."

American armies in Mexico were clinching their hold on
that country, which had cost the Government $27,000,000
and the people the lives of 27,000 soldiers. With Mexico
beaten, questions rose: "What shall we force Mexico to
pay us? Since she has no money, how much of her land
shall we take? Or shall we take over all of Mexico?"

Lincoln on December 22 introduced resolutions respect-
fully requesting the President to inform the House as to
the exact "spot of soil" where first "the blood of our citi-
zens was so shed." He directly implied that the President
had ordered American troops into land not established as
American soil. The President, Lincoln said later, was at-
tempting "to prove, by telling the truth, what he could not
prove by telling the whole truth"

In the House January 12, 1848, Lincoln defended the
vote of his party a few days before in declaring "that the
war with Mexico was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally
commenced by the President." He spoke of the course he
and others followed. "When the war began, it was my
opinion that all those who, because of knowing too little,
or because of knowing too much, could not conscientiously
approve the conduct of the President, in the beginning of it,
should, nevertheless, as good citizens and patriots, remain
silent on that point, at least till the war should be ended."

Since Mexico by revolution had overthrown the govern-
ment of Spain, and Texas by revolution had thrown off the
government of Mexico, Lincoln discussed the rights of
peoples to revolutionize. "Any people anywhere, being in-
clined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and

Congressman Lincoln 167

shake off the existing government, and form a new one
that suits them better . . . Any portion of such people that
can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of
the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of
any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down
a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may
oppose their movement. Such minority, was precisely the
case, of the tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of
revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break
up both, and make new ones."

The President's justifications of himself reminded Lin-
coln that "I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling
for his client's neck, in a desparate case, employing every
artifice to work round, befog, and cover up, with many
words, some point arising in the case, which he dared not
admit, and yet could not deny." He rehearsed the intricate
Whig arguments that American troops invaded Mexican
soil, and, "I more than suspect," as to the President, "that
he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong, — that he feels
the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to
Heaven against him . . . His mind, tasked beyond it's power,
is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature,
on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can
settle down, and be at peace ... He knows not where he
is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed
man. God grant he may be able to show, there is not some-
thing about his conscience, more painful than all his men-
tal perplexity!"

It was a fiercely partisan speech, in a style Lincoln would
in time abandon. He knew little or nothing of the pressure
on Polk and misread Polk. For months the President hesi-
tated; he was a miserably perplexed man. Of Robert
Walker, his Secretary of the Treasury, the President noted
in his diary, "He was for taking all of Mexico"; of Bu-
chanan, his Secretary of State, the notation was similar.
Finally, he wrote in his diary, after endless advice to seize
the whole territory of the Mexican nation: "I replied that
I was not prepared to go to that extent, and furthermore,
that I did not desire that anything I said should be so ob-
scure as to give rise to doubt or discussion as to what my

168

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

true meaning was; that I had in my last message declared
that I did not contemplate the conquest of Mexico."

Lincoln voted for all supplies and aid to soldiers in the
field, and for every measure laying blame on Polk and the
administration. He hoped the folks back home would un-
derstand his conduct. But many of the folks back home
couldn't see it, not even Bill Herndon. The Belleville Advo-
cate of March 2 reported a meeting in Clark County of
"patriotic Whigs and Democrats" which resolved "That
Abe Lincoln, the author of the 'Spotty' resolutions in Con-
gress against his own country, may they be long remem-
bered by his constituents, but may they cease to remember
him, except to rebuke him." The Illinois State Register told
of newspapers and public meetings that declared Lincoln to
be "a second Benedict Arnold." The Register favored tak-
ing over all of Mexico and making it part of the United
States.

In an emotion-drenched speech February 2, Alexander
Stephens voiced the depths of Whig scorn of the President,
in somewhat the vein of parts of Lincoln's speech some
three weeks earlier. 'The principle of waging war against
a neighboring people to compel them to sell their country,
is not only dishonorable, but disgraceful and infamous.
What! shall it be said that American honor aims at nothing
higher than land? . . . Never did I expect to see the day
when the Executive of this country should announce that
our honor was such a loathsome, beastly thing, that it could
not be satisfied with any achievements in arms, however
brilliant and glorious, but must feed on earth — gross, vile
dirt! — and require even a prostrate foe to be robbed of
mountain rocks and desert plains!"

Lincoln wrote to Herndon: "I just take up my pen to
say, that Mr. Stephens of Georgia, a little slim, pale-faced,
consumptive man, with a voice like Logan's, has just con-
cluded the very best speech, of an hour's length, I ever
heard. My old, withered, dry eyes, are full of tears yet. If
he writes it out any thing like he delivered it, our people
shall see a good many copies of it."

A new Senator from Mississippi, who at Buena Vista
had stayed in his saddle with a bleeding foot till the battle

Congressman Lincoln 169

was won, a cotton planter, Jefferson Davis, was saying
Mexico was held by "title of conquest," that Yucatan
should be annexed or England would take it, and if the
American advance to the Isthmus was resisted, he favored
war with Britain. His bill for ten regiments to garrison
Mexico passed the Senate by 29 to 19 but was pigeon-
holed in the House, where Whigs controlled. The need of
the South for new areas into which slavery could spread,
and by which the South would have political representation
to match that of the growing North, had brought splits and
factions in both parties north and south.

Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina believed,
"People do not understand liberty or majorities. The will of
the majority is the will of a rabble. Progressive democracy
is incompatible with liberty." His mantle of leadership
seemed to be falling on Jefferson Davis who in this year of
1848 told the Senate that if folly, fanaticism, hate and cor-
ruption were to destroy the peace and prosperity of the
Union, then "let the sections part . . . and let peace and
good will subsist." With this readiness to break up the
Union, the Southern Whigs, Toombs, Stephens, and above
all Henry Clay, could not agree. In the North the Demo-
crats were losing unity in several states on the issue of
whether slavery should be extended into the new vast ter-
ritories acquired and being settled. Among New York
Democrats had come the "Hunkers," who were said to
hanker after office on any principle, and the "Barnburn-
ers," so named after the Dutchman who burned down his
barn to get rid of the rats. Also in New York were the
elder Silver-Gray Whigs and the Radicals.

Over the country those having ears had heard of the Wil-
mot Proviso cutting across party lines, setting Southern
Whigs against Northern, Southern Democrats angry with
the Northern. Thirty-four-year-old David Wilmot of Penn-
sylvania, a Jacksonian Democrat who had fought for the
rights of labor and against imprisonment for debt, had in
1846 offered a rider to the appropriations bill, a proviso
that slavery would be shut out from all lands acquired by
the Mexican War. Since then, over and over, this proviso
had been moved as an amendment to this and that bill

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

before Congress. Lincoln voted for the proviso, so he
wrote, "at least" 40 times, he was sure. This hammering
away at no further spread of slavery brought movements,
outcries of injustice and interference, and threats of seces-
sion from Southern leaders.

Incidents constantly arose as one in February 1848 at
Mrs. Sprigg's boardinghouse. The Negro servant in the
house had been buying his freedom at a price of $300; he
had paid all but $60 when, one day, two white men came to
the house, knocked him down, tied and gagged him, took
him to a slave jail, and had him sent to New Orleans for
sale. Joshua Giddings asked for a hearing by the House and
was voted down by 98 to 88.

One February morning John Quincy Adams stood up to
speak, suddenly clutched his desk with groping fingers, then
slumped to his chair, was carried out to linger and die,
saying, "This is the last of earth, but I am content." In a
final hour Henry Clay in tears had held the old man's
hand. Lincoln served with a committee on arrangements;
there was a funeral of state, many saying Mr. Adams could
have no fear of the Recording Angel.

In the House post office was a storyteller's corner and
fellowship. Stephens of Georgia could say, "I was as inti-
mate with Mr. Lincoln as with any other man except per-
haps Mr. Toombs." Lincoln could tell of Stuart and Doug-
las campaigning; arriving late one night at a tavern,, the
landlord showed them two beds, each with a man sleeping
in it. Douglas asked their politics and the landlord pointed
to one a Whig and the other a Democrat, Douglas saying,
"Stuart, you sleep with the Whig and I'll sleep with the
Democrat." Or the Kentucky justice of the peace, tired of
two lawyers wrangling after his decision, speaking out: "If
the court is right — and she think she air — why, then you
air wrong, and she knows you is— shet up!"

Lincoln wrote to Herndon that "by way of getting the
hang of the House," he had spoken on a post office ques-
tion, and, "I was about as badly scared, and no worse, as I
am when I speak in court." His House record showed him
working hard and faithfully on petitions, appointments,
pensions, documents for constituents, routine measures

Congressman Lincoln 171

such as internal improvements, public roads, canals, rivers
and harbors. He found the wrangling and quibbling much
the same as in the Illinois Legislature. Once he counseled
that to pay for canals with canal tolls and tonnage duties,
before the canals were dug, was like the Irishman and his
new boots: "I shall niver git 'em on till I wear 'em a day
or two, and stretch 'em a little."

One evening at the library of the Supreme Court, after
digging in many books and documents, Lincoln drew out
volumes to read in his room at Mrs. Sprigg's. The library
was going to close for the night, so he tied a large ban-
danna around the books, ran a stick through the knots,
slung the stick over his shoulder, and walked out of the li-
brary. Wearing a short circular blue cloak he had bought
since coming to Washington, he walked to his Capitol Hill
lodging, where he read in his books, then took a brass
key from his vest pocket and wound his watch, put his boot
heels into a bootjack and pulled off his boots, blew out the
candlelights and crept into a warm yellow flannel night-
shirt that came down halfway between his knees and ankles.

In April he had written his wife, "Dear Mary: In this
troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied. When you
were here, I thought you hindered me some in attending
to business; but now, having nothing but business- — no va-
riety — it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me. I hate to
sit down and direct documents, and I hate to stay in this old
room by myself." He wrote of shopping, as she wished,
for "the little plaid stockings" to fit "Eddy's dear little feet,"
and "I wish you to enjoy yourself in every possible way
. . . Very soon after you went away, I got what I think a
very pretty, set of shirt-bosom studs — modest little ones,
jet, set in gold, only costing 50 cents a piece, or 1.50 for
the whole. Suppose you do not prefix the 'Hon' to the ad-
dress on your letters to me any more . . . and you are en-
tirely free from head-ache? That is good — good — consid-
ering it is the first spring you have been free from it since
we were acquainted. I am afraid you will get so well, and
fat, and young, as to be wanting to marry again ... I did
not get rid of the impression of that foolish dream about

172

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

dear Bobby till I got your letter written the same day. What
did he and Eddy think of the little letters father sent them?
Dont let the blessed fellows forget father." Their children
were a common and warm bond.

In June he wrote to her at Lexington, 'The leading mat-
ter in your letter, is your wish to return to this side of the
Mountains. Will you be a good girl in all things, if I con-
sent? Then come along, and that as soon as possible. Hav-
ing got the idea in my head, I shall be impatient till I see
you . . . Come on just as soon as you can. I want to see
you, and our dear — dear boys very much. Every body here
wants to see our dear Bobby." Her letter to him had said,
"How much, I wish instead of writing, we were together
this evening. I feel very sad away from you." But campaign
duties pressed him and her visit to Washington couldn't be
managed.

He wrote to her July 2 a long newsy letter ending, "By
the way, you do not intend to do without a girl, because
the one you had has left you? Get another as soon as you
can to take charge of the dear codgers. Father expected to
see you all sooner; but let it pass; stay as long as you please,
and come when you please. Kiss and love the dear rascals."
He signed his letters to her "Affectionately A. Lincoln,"
and hers to him were signed "Truly yours M.L."

It seemed byplay and banter in his ending a July letter
to Herndon, "As to kissing a pretty girl, [I] know one very
pretty one, but I guess she wont let me kiss her."

In a dignified speech June 20 Lincoln questioned inten-
tions to amend the Constitution indicated in the Demo-
cratic platform. He advised, "No slight occasion should
tempt us to touch it. Better not take the first step, which
may lead to a habit of altering it . . . New provisions,
would introduce new difficulties, and thus create, and in-
crease appetite for still further change. No sir, let it stand
as it is." On July 27 he told the House that "on the promi-
nent questions . . . Gen: Taylor's course is at least as well
defined as is Gen: Cass' " (the Democratic nominee) ,
adding later, "I hope and believe, Gen: Taylor, if elected,
would not veto the [Wilmot] Proviso. But I do not know it.

Congressman Lincoln 173

Yet, if I knew he would, I still would vote for him. I should
do so, because, in my judgment, his election alone, can
defeat Gen: Cass; and because, should slavery thereby go
to the territory we now have, just so much will certainly
happen by the election of Cass."

After this candid presentation he swung into the comic
vein of a stump speech before a rough-and-tumble crowd.
He pointed to General Cass during nine years drawing ten
rations a day from the Government at $730 a year. "At eat-
ing too, his capacities are shown to be quite as wonderful.
From October 1821 to May 1822 he ate ten rations a day
in Michigan, ten rations a day here in Washington, and near
five dollars worth a day on the road between the two
places! And then there is an important discovery in his ex-
ample — the art of being paid for what one eats, instead of
having to pay for it . . . Mr. Speaker, we have all heard
of the animal standing in doubt between two stacks of hay,
and starving to death. The like of that would never happen
to Gen: Cass; place the stacks a thousand miles apart, he
would stand stock still midway between them, and eat them
both at once, and the green grass along the line would be
apt to suffer some too at the same time ... I have heard
some things from New- York; and if they are true, one
might well say of your party there, as a drunken fellow once
said when he heard the reading of an indictment for hog-
stealing. The clerk read on till he got to, and through the
words 'did steal, take, and carry away, ten boars, ten sows,
ten shoats, and ten pigs' at which he exclaimed Well, by
golly, that is the most equally divided gang of hogs, I ever
did hear of.' If there is any other gang of hogs more equally
divided than the democrats of New-York are about this
time, I have not heard of it." The Baltimore American said
the speaker kept the House roaring.

Distinct, irrevocable events of 1848 were throwing shad-
ows pointing to events lurking in farther shadows dark be-
yond reading. In February the Mexican War ended with
a treaty; New Mexico and Upper California were ceded
to the United States; the lower Rio Grande from its mouth
to El Paso became the boundary of Texas; for territory
acquired the United States was to pay Mexico $15,000,000.

174

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Calhoun, Davis, Rhett and others of the South were openly
trying to organize secession of the Southern States from
the Union. In the North was explosive force in the Free-
Soil party which nominated the former Democratic Presi-
dent Martin Van Buren for President and Charles Francis
Adams, son of John Quincy Adams, for Vice-President.
Their platform called for "the rights of free labor against
the aggressions of the slave power," cheap postage, "free
grants" of land to actual settlers, with the slogan "Free
Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men." Names that
counted were in the new party, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio,
Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, William Cullen Bryant,
Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, David Wilmot and others.
Antislavery Whigs and Democrats were pouring into the
new party in some states saying here was a cause to fight
for, whereas the Whig and Democratic party platforms
straddled, weaseled and stood for nothing on any issue of
the hour.

The great Whig hero, Daniel Webster, had a certain maj-
esty but "lacked popular appeal." The other idolized vet-
eran Whig hero, Henry Clay, had run three times and lost.
And Lincoln, with Stephens and others, in a clique calling
themselves "The Young Indians," served in the forefront
of those who saw Zachary Taylor as the one candidate to
win in the coming campaign. True enough, Taylor was
owner on his Louisiana plantation of more than a hundred
slaves, was naive and somewhat ignorant of politics; he
had never voted for President but said that had he voted for
President in 1844 it would have been for Clay; he saw the
Wilmot Proviso as "a mere bugbare" of agitators and it
would disappear; he cautioned, "I am not an ultra Whig."
But the name of "Old Zach" at 64 carried magic; he was
honest, rugged, plain; against terrific odds his armies, by
his keen strategy and dogged courage, had won for him
the beloved nickname of "Old Rough and Ready." He had
spoken of the war as uncalled-for and had moved his troops
into action only under direct orders which he obeyed as a
trained and loyal soldier.

In the Philadelphia convention in June the first ballot
gave Taylor 111, Henry Clay 97, General Winfield Scott

Congressman Lincoln 175

43, Daniel Webster 22. As a delegate, Lincoln voted for
Taylor on all ballots, cheered the nomination of Taylor on
the fourth, and wrote to Illinois that Taylor's nomination
took the Democrats "on the blind side" and "It turns the
war thunder against them. The war is now to them, the gal-
lows of Haman, which they built for us, and on which they
are doomed to be hanged themselves." He could see a va-
riety of factions, "all the odds and ends are with us"; all
was high hope and confidence.

A letter of Herndon June 15 was "heart-sickening,"
"discouraging," Lincoln wrote, advising his young partner,
"You must not wait to be brought forward by the older
men. For instance do you suppose that I should ever have
got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed
forward by older men. You young men get together and
form a Rough & Ready club ... as you go along, gather
up all the shrewd wild boys about town, whether just of age,
or a little under age." Herndon had asked him to send along
all speeches made about Taylor and Lincoln wrote that he
had sent on the Congressional Globe containing "every
speech made by every man" in both Houses, and, "Can I
send any more? Can I send speeches that nobody has
made?" Another Herndon letter questioned the motives of
"the old men," and Lincoln wrote, "I suppose I am now
one of the old men ... I was young once, and I am sure
I was never ungenerously thrust back . . . Allow me to as-
sure you, that suspicion and jealousy never did help any
man in any situation . . . You have been a laborious, stu-
dious young man" and he shouldn't allow his mind "to be
improperly directed."

Because of the Whig party's "turn about is fair play"
policy, Lincoln was not running for re-election to Congress.
When news came to him of the August 7 election in Illi-
nois, Stephen T. Logan, running for Lincoln's seat, had lost
by 106 votes to a Mexican War veteran. Lincoln at head-
quarters of the national Whig committee was busy frank-
ing documents, helping edit a Whig paper The Battery, get-
ting out campaign literature, writing political letters. He
was assigned to speak in New England where the Free-
Soilers had a threatening strength. By "steam cars" to New

176 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

York and probably boat to Norwich he made the three-day
trip that had him September 12 in Worcester, Massachu-
setts, where he declared that Taylor was "just the man to
whom the interests, principles and prosperity of the country
might be safely intrusted." The Free-Soil platform in gen-
eral was like the pantaloons the Yankee peddler offered for
sale, "large enough for any man, small enough for any
boy." He spoke in New Bedford, Boston, Chelsea, Cam-
bridge, and in a day speech at Dedham, a young Whig
took note, "He wore a black alpaca sack coat, turned up
the sleeves of this, and then the cuffs of his shirt. Next he
loosened his necktie and soon after took it off altogether.
He soon had his audience as by a spell. I never saw men
more delighted. His style was the most familiar and off-
hand possible."

At Taunton a reporter wrote, "His awkward gesticula-
tions, the ludicrous management of his voice and the comi-
cal expression of his countenance, all conspired to make
his hearers laugh at the mere anticipation of the joke be-
fore it appeared." He quoted a sarcastic Free-Soiler, "Gen-
eral Taylor is a slaveholder, therefore we go for him to
prevent the extension of slavery," and said the correct form
of the syllogism should be: "General Taylor is a slave-
holder, but he will do more to prevent the extension of
slavery than any other man whom it is possible to elect,
therefore we go for Taylor." At Tremont Temple in Bos-
ton he spoke after Governor William H. Seward of New
York who was soon to be elected U.S. Senator. At their
hotel Lincoln told Seward he had been thinking about Sew-
ard's speech, and, "I reckon you are right. We have got to
deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more
attention to it hereafter."

Traveling west Lincoln at Albany talked with Thurlow
Weed and together they visited Millard Fillmore, Whig
candidate for Vice-President. Next Lincoln saw Niagara
Falls. He left Buffalo September 26 on the steamer Globe
for a 1,047-mile cruise that had him in Chicago October 5.
He wrote deep meditations on Niagara Falls, its "wonder"
and "great charm," and how, "When Columbus first sought
this continent — when Christ suffered on the cross — when

Congressman Lincoln 177

Moses led Israel through the Red-Sea — nay, even, when
Adam first came from the hand of his Maker — then as now,
Niagara was roaring here . . . The Mammoth and Mastodon
— now so long dead, that fragments of their monstrous
bones, alone testify, that they ever lived, have gazed on
Niagara." Lincoln's sense of history and the past, for all
his incessant newspaper reading, came from books that be-
came part of his mind.

In Chicago he spoke for the Whig ticket two hours to a
crowd so large it had to adjourn from the courthouse to the
public square. With Mrs. Lincoln and the children he trav-
eled to Springfield. Of his two-hour speech in a Peoria
stopover, the Democratic Press said, "Mr. Lincoln blew his
nose, bobbed his head, threw up his coat tail, and delivered
an immense amount of sound and fury." Before Election
Day he spoke in eight or ten Illinois towns for the Whig
ticket, always advising mat a vote for the Free-Soil ticket
might turn out to be a vote for Cass. As to the United
States reaching out for more territory, he quoted the farmer
about land, "I ain't greedy; I only want what jines mine."

Election returns (exclusive of South Carolina, where the
legislature chose electors) gave a popular vote for Taylor
1,360,752; Cass 1,219,962; Van Buren 291,342. Ohio
elected six Free-Soilers to Congress, other states six more,
which forebode the slavery issue would blaze on. Cass had
carried Illinois but there was comfort that Ned Baker, who
had moved to Galena, was elected to Congress. Lincoln
had written of him, "He is a good hand to raise a breeze."
It counted a little, too, that his congressional district had
given a whopping majority of more than 1,500 for Taylor.
And the new legislature elected a new U.S. Senator, James
Shields, a Democrat, with whom Lincoln had more than a
slight acquaintance.

In a corner of his Springfield office Lincoln whittled and
shaped a wooden model of a steamboat with "adjustable
buoyant air chambers," "sliding spars," ropes and pulleys.
On the Detroit River he had seen a steamboat stuck on a
sand bar; barrels, boxes and empty casks forced under the
vessel lifted it off. Lincoln finished a model, wrote a de-

178 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

scription of its workings, and the next year had it patented.

In late November 1848 Lincoln left Springfield for St.
Louis and by steamboat up the Ohio River and then by rail
reached Washington and took his seat in the House Decem-
ber 7, three days after the Thirtieth Congress had con-
vened. While traveling, he wrote that he took "very extra
care" of a letter containing money. "To make it more se-
cure than it would be in my hat, where I carry most all my
packages, I put it in my trunk."

He spoke briefly and moderately for river and harbor
improvements by Federal aid and a more liberal policy in
public lands for settlers, voting regularly for measures
aimed at free governments in California and New Mexico,
voting again for the Wilmot Proviso whenever it came up.
He voted often against sweeping, straight-out abolitionist
measures to prohibit slavery immediately and without res-
ervations in the District of Columbia.

He loved his fellow boarder Joshua Giddings, a big,
hearty, earnest, honest, rugged Buckeye of a man, but he
couldn't vote for Giddings' bill to make a clean sweep-out
of slavery in the District. Those who later saw Lincoln's
growth beginning with his humiliations of this period gave
him too little credit for the early sagacity of his resolution
before the House January 10, 1849; on seeing no chance
for its adoption he didn't introduce it as a bill. What he
offered was the keenest solution then possible of the slavery
problem in the District. In it was the foretokening that he
could umpire between the North and the South, that he
understood both sections without prejudice, that he could
relate the tangled past to the uncertain future by offering
only what might be workable in the immediate present.

He proposed that no new slaves, could be brought into
the District to live there, except temporarily the slaves,
"necessary servants," of Government officers from slave-
holding states. After January 1, 1850, all children born of
slave mothers should be free, should be "reasonably sup-
ported and educated" by the owners of their mothers
though owing "reasonable service" to such owners until ar-
riving at an age to be determined. By these two provisions
— no new slaves to be brought in and all children born of

Congressman Lincoln 179

slaves to be free — and all living slaves in the District cer-
tain to die sometime, there would be a definite, calculable
day when slavery would have vanished from the District.
The President, Secretary of State and Secretary of the
Treasury should be a board to determine the value of such
slaves as owners "may desire to emancipate." Yet Congress
must not impose its will on the District; therefore let it
provide an election where all "free white male" voters could
say whether they wanted such emancipation.

One proviso was to make trouble for Lincoln then and
for years after. Washington authorities would be "em-
powered and required" to arrest and deliver to owners "all
fugitive slaves escaping into said District." Lincoln said
that he had shown his proposals to 15 leading citizens of
the District and "he had authority to say that every one of
them desired that some proposition like this should pass."
The cry came from several members, "Who are they? Give
us their names," to which Lincoln made no answer. In the
many debates of various angles of the slavery question, he
kept silence. Angry Free-Soilers, anxious antislavery and
proslavery Whigs and Democrats clashed in wild disputes,
and Lincoln sat still. He had begun waiting for unforeseen
events sure to come.

He saw "Old Zach" inaugurated March 4, did his best
at reaching the new Whig President and having him ap-
point Ned Baker to the Cabinet, but it didn't come off. He
began writing letters and for months was to go on with
letters asking the President or department heads to appoint
this or that good Whig to this or that office. For several
old friends he landed places, but he made some enemies;
there were always the disgruntled and suspicious. He was to
write to the Secretary of State that Taylor's habit of throw-
ing appointments over to department heads was fixing in
the public mind "the unjust and ruinous character of [the
President] being a mere man of straw," and it could "damn
us "all inevitably."

Admitted March 7 to practice before the U.S. Supreme
Court he argued a case appealed from an Illinois court, and
lost it.

Back in Springfield, for months he carried on a furious

180 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

and snarled campaign of letter writing, conferences, wire-
pulling, aimed at getting for himself or for some other Illi-
nois Whig, the appointment of Commissioner of the Gen-
eral Land Office at Washington, salary $3,000 a year. The
politics of the affair seemed to narrow down to where Lin-
coln would have to go after the office for himself or it
would be lost to southern Illinois Whigs. Early in June he
wrote to many: "Would you as soon I should have the Gen-
eral Land Office as any other Illinoian? If you would, write
me to that effect at Washington, where I shall be soon. No
time to lose." In June in Washington wearing a linen duster,
he offered reasons why he, an original Taylor man, should
be named over the Clay man who landed it. Justin But-
terfield won through northern Illinois and Chicago influ-
ence, besides that of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.
When Secretary of State John M. Clayton notified Lincoln
August 10, 1849, of his appointment as Secretary of the
Territory of Oregon, he replied, "I respectfully decline the
office" but he would be "greatly obliged" if the place be
offered to Simeon Francis, editor of the oldest and leading
Whig paper of the state.

Chapter 8

Back Home in Springfield

Back in Springfield picking up law practice again he still
had his sense of humor and the advice he had long ago
given Speed that when feeling sad work is a cure. He liked
the law. He was a born lawyer. He went to it, later writing,
"From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, I practiced law more
assiduously than ever before." He traveled the Eighth Cir-
cuit, staying two days to two weeks in each county seat, in
some years from September till Thanksgiving and from
March till June away from his Springfield home. He kept
in close touch with the people, their homes, kitchens, barns,

Back Home in Springfield 181

fields, their churches, schools, hotels, saloons, their ways
of working, worshiping, loafing.

In February 1850 the four-year-old boy Edward Baker
Lincoln died. He could call to Eddie and the boy had no
living ears to hear. The mother took it hard and it was his
place to comfort and restore, if he could, a broken woman.

From the funeral sermon by the Reverend James Smith
of the First Presbyterian Church, a friendship grew between
the Lincoln family and Mr. Smith. He had been a wild boy
in Scotland, a scoffer at religion, then a preacher in Ken-
tucky; he could tell a story — he and Lincoln were good
company. The Lincolns rented a pew; Mrs. Lincoln took
the sacrament, and joined in membership. Mr. Smith pre-
sented Lincoln with his book, The Christian's Defense, a
reply to infidels and atheists. Lincoln read the book, at-
tended revival meetings, was interested, but when asked to
join the church he said he "couldn't quite see it."

Close friends, such as Herndon and Matheny, saw Lin-
coln as a sort of infidel, saying he told them he couldn't see
the Bible as the revelation of God, or Jesus as the Son of
God. Lincoln, however, read the Bible closely, knew it
from cover to cover, its famous texts, stories and psalms;
he quoted it in talks to juries, in speeches, in letters. There
were evangelical Christian church members who saw him
as solemn, reverent, truly religious. Jesse W. Fell of Bloom-
ington felt that Lincoln's views had likeness to those of the
noted preachers, Theodore Parker and William Ellery Chan-
ning. Fell gave Lincoln a complete collection of Chan-
ning's sermons.

Over the year 1850 Lincoln could read in newspapers
and the Congressional Globe of the tumults and hazards of
political drama in Washington. Only by slender circum-
stance and hair-trigger chances was the Union saved. In
Senate and House men of both sides of the Great Compro-
mise shook their fists and cried threats. A Mississippi Sena-
tor, Foote, called a Missouri Senator, Benton, a "calum-
niator," a liar. Benton walked straight toward Foote, who
pulled a revolver and cocked it. Benton tore open his coat
and shirt, shouting, "I disdain to carry arms. Let him fire!

182

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Stand out of the way and let the assassin fire!" Other Sen-
ators rushed in, took the revolver from Foote, and the de-
bate went on.

In January Henry Clay, whom Lincoln was to term "my
beau ideal of a statesman," had introduced the omnibus
bills and argued that only by compromise, by give and
take, by each side north and south making concessions,
could the Union be saved. As his bills came out of a special
committee they would let California into the Union as a
Free State; New Mexico and Utah would become terri-
tories, without reference to slavery; Texas would be paid
for giving up boundary claims in New Mexico and having
her other boundaries fixed; the slave trade in the District
of Columbia would be abolished but slavery would continue
so long as it was insisted on by Maryland, which had ceded
the District land to the Federal Government. Last and most
fiercely disputed was the proposed new Fugitive Slave Law,
"with teeth in it"; the Negro claimed as a slave could not
have a jury trial and could not testify; a Federal official
would be empowered to decide ownership and if he decided
for the Negro his fee was $5.00 but if his decision was for
the owner his fee was $10; also anyone helping a runaway
Negro was made liable to fine and imprisonment.

Daniel Webster on March 7 made a three-hour speech
to crowded galleries. The eyes of the audience left him a
few moments when the foremost interpreter of the doctrine
of states' rights and secession, the aged John C. Calhoun,
who was to die 24 days later, had his gaunt and bent form
in a black cloak helped to the seat he had held so many
years. Webster spoke for the Great Compromise, bill by
bill, as the only agreement by which the Union could be
held together. Mr. Lincoln out in Illinois must have dwelt
with keen eyes on Mr. Webster's passionate exclamations
toward his close: "Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir, your
eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle. The
dismemberment of this vast country without convulsion!
The breaking up of the great deep without ruffling the sur-
face! Who is so foolish ... as to expect to see any such
things? . . . There can be no such thing as a peaceable se-
cession." Webster had tried, in private conferences, to pro-

Back Home in Springfield 183

vide jury trial for the fugitive slave, but that was one of
many matters to which in that hour he could not refer.
Webster, wrote one of his intimate friends, was "a com-
pound of strength and weakness, dust and divinity."

Henry Clay spoke, again and again, at times to storms
of applause from crowded galleries. He rebuked personal
ambitions. An individual man is "an atom, almost invis-
ible without a magnifying glass ... a drop of water in the
great deep, which evaporates and is borne off by the winds;
a grain of sand, which is soon gathered to the dust from
which it sprung. Shall a being so small, so petty, so fleeting,
so evanescent, oppose itself to onward march of a great
nation, to subsist for ages and ages to come? . . . Forbid
it God!"

President Taylor, it was known, had made up his mind
that if Texans, as they were threatening, moved their troops
to interfere with the New Mexico boundary, "I will take
command of the army myself to enforce the laws." To the
Southern Whigs, Toombs and Stephens, who called on him
and said his action would bring civil war and dissolve the
Union, he said, "If you men are taken in rebellion against
the Union, I will hang you with less reluctance than I
hanged spies and deserters in Mexico." Taylor was 65 and
scandals, quarrels and insoluble problems had worn him.
He sat three hours in the hot sun near the Washington
Monument ceremonial on the Fourth of July, listening to
orations calling for conciliation and national harmony. He
drank ice water, went home to the White House and ate
from a basket of cherries, disobeyed his doctor and drank
goblets of iced milk and ate more cherries. He died July 9,
saying, "I have endeavored to do my duty." With his death
hope ran higher of passing the Great Compromise.

Serving as floor captain for the worn men, Clay and
Webster, was Senator Douglas; he traded and rounded up
votes; he framed provisions of the three most important
bills; he maneuvered against the outspoken threats of im-
mediate secession, made speeches for an ocean-to-ocean
republic. He replied in anger and scorn to the Massachu-
setts Free-Soiler, Senator Charles Sumner, who called
Douglas."a Northern man with Southern principles." Doug-

184 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

las heard and would never forget and would come back
to it again and again that the Whig Senator from New
York, William H. Seward, declared, . . there is a higher
law than the Constitution, which regulates our author-
ity . . He kept a wary eye on new Free-Soil Senators
who held the Fugitive Slave Law to be infamous and said
so. Douglas kept close to the new Whig President, Millard
Fillmore, chubby-faced, moderate, suave, doing his best
for the Great Compromise. By majorities of about one-
third or more, the omnibus bills, some of them slightly mod-
ified, passed and became law. From January on through
part of August the great debate had raged in Washington
and spread over the country. Now cannon boomed over
Washington, bonfires blazed, processions roared through
the streets, stopping for speeches at the homes of Webster,
Douglas and others. Drinking men said the occasion called
for nothing less than every patriot to get stone blind drunk,
which many of them did. And over the country there set-
tled a curious, quiet, bland, enigmatic peace. In many a
house men breathed easier and slept better because seces-
sion and possibly war had been stood off. The quiet was
broken only by the abolitionists, Free-Soilers, antislavery
men in both of the old parties, delivering their shrill or gut-
tural curses on the new Fugitive Slave Law. Lincoln, two
years later, in eulogizing Clay, would say of this new peace,
'The nation has passed its perils, and is free, prosperous,
and powerful."

In late May 1849 Dennis Hanks wrote Lincoln of the
illness of his father Thomas Lincoln and, "He Craves to
See you all the time & he wonts you to Come if you ar able
to git hure, for you are his only Child that is of his own
flush & blood ... he wonts you to prepare to meet him in
the unknown world, or in heven, for he think that ower
Savour has a Crown of glory, prepared for him I wright
this with a bursting hart ..." A few days later came a let-
ter from Augustus H. Chapman, who married a grand-
daughter of Sarah Bush Lincoln; the father was out of
danger and would be well in a short time.

When later word came of his father on the Coles County

Back Home in Springfield 185

farm dying in January 1851 Lincoln wrote to his step-
brother John D. Johnston:

I feel sure you have not failed to use my name, if
necessary, to procure a doctor, or any thing else for
Father in his present sickness. My business is such that
I could hardly leave home now, if it were not, as it is,
that my own wife is sick-abed. (It is a case of baby-
sickness, and I suppose is not dangerous.) I sincerely
hope Father may yet recover his health; but at all
events, tell him to remember to call upon, and confide
in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker; who will
not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes
the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our
heads; and He will not forget the dying man, who puts
his trust in Him. Say to him that if we could meet now,
it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful
than pleasant; but that if it be his lot to go now, he
will soon have a joyous meeting with many loved ones
gone before; and where the rest of us, through the
help of God, hope ere-long to join them.

When death came close, with a murmur from deep rivers
and a cavern of dark stars, Lincoln could use Bible speech.
The father died January 17, 1851, and the only son, with
a crowded court calendar, including three Supreme Court
cases, did not go to the funeral. Lincoln's final somber
words to his father could be construed several ways. To
be at the deathbed of one for whom you have even a small
crumb of affection is definitely "more painful than pleas-
ant." Thomas Lincoln to the last was a churchgoing, re-
ligious man, his invariable grace at meals, as reported by
a local paper: "Fit and prepare us for humble service, we
beg for Christ's sake. Amen."

When in Congress, Lincoln had written to his father, "I
very cheerfully send you the twenty dollars, which sum
you say is necessary to save your land from sale . . . Give
my love to Mother, and all the connections. Affectionately
your Son." Could there have been no slight pride or tone
of warmth in his often quoting wise proverbs or quaint
humor as coming from his father? "If you make a bad

186

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

bargain, hug it the tighter." "Every man must skin his own
skunk."

A local paper reported, "One day when alone with her
husband, Mrs. Lincoln said, Thomas, we have lived to-
gether a long time and you have never yet told me whom
you like best, your first wife or me.' Thomas replied, 4 Oh,
now, Sarah, that reminds me of old John Hardin down in
Kentucky who had a fine-looking pair of horses, and a
neighbor coming in one day and looking at them said,
"John, which horse do you like best?" John said, "I can't
tell; one of them kicks and the other bites and I don't know
which is wust." ' It is plain to see where Abraham Lincoln
got his talent for wit and apt illustration." When a third
boy baby come to the Lincoln family in 1850 he was
named William Wallace: the fourth one in 1853 was named
Thomas after his grandfather, so Mrs. Lincoln wrote in a
letter to Sarah Bush.

The next summer Lincoln as sole heir deeded the west 80
acres of his father's 120-acre farm to John D. Johnston,
subject to Sarah Bush Lincoln's dower right. This step-
brother bothered him; Lincoln gave Johnston more free,
sharp, peremptory advice than he did anyone else. While
in Congress he refused to loan Johnston $80, well aware
that Johnston was somewhat of a dude, handy with the
girls, at times selling liquor by the jug. "You are not lazy,
and still you are an idler. I doubt whether since I saw you,
you have done a good whole day's work, in any one day . . .
This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty."
Lincoln promised that for every dollar Johnston would
earn he would pay him another dollar. "You say you would
almost give your place in Heaven for $70 or $80. Then you
value your place in Heaven very cheaply . . . You have
always been [kind] to me, and I do not now mean to be
unkind to you . . . Affectionately Your brother."

On hearing that Johnston was going* to sell his land
and move to Missouri, he wrote, "What can you do in
Missouri, better than here? Is the land any richer? Can you
there, any more than here, raise corn, & wheat & oats,
without work? Will any body there, any more than here,
do your work for you? . . . Squirming & crawling about

Back Home in Springfield 187

from place to place can do no good . . . part with the land
you have, and my life upon it, you will never after, own a
spot big enough to bury you in. Half you will get for the
land, you spend in moving to Missouri, and the other half
you will eat and drink, and wear out, & no foot of land
will be bought . . . The Eastern forty acres I intend to keep
for Mother while she lives — if you will not cultivate it; it
will rent for enough to support her . . . Her Dower in the
other two forties, she can let you have, and no thanks to
[me] . . . Your thousand pretences . . . deceive no body
but yourself. Go to work is the only cure for your case."

To this was added a postscript which might be termed
the only known letter Lincoln wrote to his beloved step-
mother, who was to say, "Abe was the best boy I ever saw.
His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run to-
gether, more in the same channel." The postscript read:

A word for Mother:

Chapman tells me he wants you to go and live with
him. If I were you I would try it awhile. If you get
tired of it (as I think you will not) you can return to
your own home. Chapman feels very kindly to you;
and I have no doubt he will make your situation very
pleasant. Sincerely your Son A. Lincoln

Later Lincoln had to warn Johnston not to sell land be-
longing to his mother. Johnston married a nice 16-year-old
girl, got her parents to sell their land, and with the money
moved to Arkansas, bought land, failed as a farmer and
small-scale whisky distiller. Years later Lincoln saw a young
son of Johnston in jail at Urbana for stealing a watch; Lin-
coln spent hours with the boy and then in kindly talk per-
suaded the owners of the watch to drop action against the
boy.

After 1 1 years of marriage Lincoln and Mary Todd had
stood together at the cradles of four babies, at the grave of
one. For these little ones Lincoln was thankful. To handle
them, play with them and watch them grow, pleased his
sense of the solemn and the ridiculous.

188

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

The father and mother had come to understand that
each was strong and each was weak. Habits held him that
it was useless for her to try to break. If he chose to lie on
the front room carpet, on the small of his back, reading,
that was his way. If he came to the table in his shirt sleeves
and ate his victuals absently, his eyes and thoughts far off,
that too was his way. She tried to stop him from answering
the front doorbell and leave it to the servant. But he would
go to the front door in carpet slippers and shirt sleeves to
ask what was wanted. Once two fine ladies came to see Mrs.
Lincoln; he looked for her and asked the callers in, drawl-
ing, "She'll be down soon as she gets her trotting harness
on."

When his wife wrangled with the iceman claiming an
overcharge or when she screamed at John Mendonsa that
she would pay only ten cents a quart for berries, that they
were not worth 15 cents, he spoke quietly to her as "Mary,"
and did his best to straighten things. Mary had sewed her
own clothes, had sewed clothes for the children; he let her
manage the house. In Springfield she was quoted as once
saying, "Money! He never gives me any money; he leaves
his pocketbook where I can take what I want."

In many matters Lincoln trusted her judgment. Herndon
wrote much against her yet he noted: "She was an excel-
lent judge of human nature, a better reader of men's mo-
tives than her husband and quick to detect those who had
designs upon and sought to use him. She was, in a good
sense, a stimulant. She kept him from lagging, was con-
stantly prodding him to keep up the struggle. She wanted
to be a leader in society. Realizing that Lincoln's rise in
the world would elevate and strengthen her, she strove in
every way to promote his fortunes, to keep him moving,
and thereby win the world's applause." When Lincoln or-
dered bricks for a front fence to be "about two feet above
ground" and when later they rebuilt the upper half-story,
making a two-story house, Lincoln naturally consulted her
every wish.

Talk about her over Springfield ran that she economized
in the kitchen to have fine clothes; she had a terrible temper
and tongue. That her husband had married her a thousand

Back Home in Springfield 189

dollars in debt, that he charged low fees and had careless
habits, that he trusted her and let her have her own way in
the household economy, didn't fit well into the gossip. That
she was at times a victim of mental disorder, that she was
often sorry and full of regrets after a wild burst of temper,
didn't make for exciting gossip.

She knew he liked cats and kittens as he did no other
animals. She had written to him gaily from Kentucky of
fun and trouble with kittens. Staying with one of the Grigs-
bys in Indiana a cat's yowling in the night broke all sleep
and Lincoln got out of bed, held and quieted the cat and
enjoyed it.

In July 1850 and in Chicago on a law case, Whigs
pressed Lincoln to memorialize Zachary Taylor. He spoke
as a Whig to Whigs, by inference defending the Whig pol-
icy toward the Mexican War. How Lincoln himself might
wish to behave in crises when other men were losing their
heads, he intimated in saying of Taylor: "He could not be
flurried, and he could not be scared . . . He was alike
averse to sudden, and to startling quarrels; and he pursued
no man with revenge"

When Henry Clay died in June 1852, (Springfield stores
closed, and after services in the Episcopal Church, a pro-
cession moved to the Hall of Representatives where Lincoln
sketched Clay's long life, how Clay on occasions by his
moderation and wisdom had held the Union together when
it seemed ready to break. He quoted Clay on the American
Colonization Society: "There is a moral fitness in the idea
of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have
been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and vio-
lence. Transplanted in a foreign land, they will carry back
to their native soil the rich fruits of religion, civilization,
law and liberty." How desperate this hope, Lincoln was to
learn at cost. Over the South were 3,204,000 slaves valued
on tax books at more than one and one-half billion dollars.
How to pay for them as property, if that were conceivable,
and then "transplant" them to Africa, was the problem.
With Henry Clay, Lincoln leaned on the hope of buying
slave property and colonizing it in Africa, both laying

190

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

blame on radical abolitionists who were saying they would
welcome a breakup of the Union, and laying equal blame
on proud Southern hotheads who saw slavery as a sanc-
tioned institution for which they were ready to secede from
the Union.

Lincoln in 1852 had for 20 years been a loyal Whig
party leader who had shaken hands with nearly all active
local Whig leaders over Illinois. He seemed to be merely
a party wheel horse in his seven speeches in the 1852 cam-
paign, discussing candidates and personalities rather than
any great issues. Of Franklin Pierce, the Democratic can-
didate for President, he noted, 'The first thing ever urged
in his favor as a candidate was his having given a strange
boy a cent to buy candy with." The inflation of Pierce as
a heroic brigadier general in the Mexican War reminded
him of oldtime militia rules. "No man is to wear more than
five pounds of cod-fish for epaulets, or more than thirty
yards of bologna sausages for a sash; and no two men are
to dress alike, and if any two should dress alike the one
that dresses most alike is to be fined."

He belittled statements of Douglas with a relentless
logic that became comic and had an audience splitting its
sides. He had never read Seward's "supposed proclamation
of a 'higher law' " but if it was intended to "foment a dis-
obedience to the constitution, or to the constitutional laws
of the country, it has my unqualified condemnation." He
praised General Winfield Scott, a hero of two wars, the
third military candidate of the Whigs for President. He had
seen Southern Whigs favoring the Whig President Fillmore
for the nomination but Seward and the extreme antislavery
Whigs had swung the nomination to Scott. When Scott in
the November election carried only four states, the ques-
tion was asked by good Whigs, "Is the party falling to
pieces?"

Herndon wrote that Lincoln was "the most secretive
man" he ever knew. A Danville man said, "Lincoln doesn't
show at first all that is in him." A lawyer who had tried
cases with him, said, "You can never tell what Lincoln

Back Home in Springfield 191

is going to do till he does it." Once during a criminal trial,
Lincoln had been giving away one point after another, and
as Lincoln was speaking to the jury, a colleague, Amzi Mc-
Williams, whispered to other attorneys, "Lincoln will pitch
in heavy now, for he has hid." Of two friendly lawyers,
one said Lincoln "was harmless as a dove and wise as a
serpent," and the other, "He respectfully listened to all
advice, and rarely, if ever, followed it." Still another saw
him as. elusive: "While guilty of no duplicity, he could
hide his thoughts and intentions more efficiently than any
man with a historical record."

About the year 1850, wrote Herndon, he and Lincoln
were driving in Lincoln's one-horse buggy to the Menard
County Court. The case they were to try would touch on
hereditary traits. "During the ride he spoke, for the first
time in my hearing, of his mother, dwelling on . . . quali-
ties he inherited from her. He said, among other things,
that she was the illegitimate daughter of Lucy Hanks and
a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter; and he argued that
from this last source came his power of analysis, his logic,
his mental activity, his ambition . . . His theory . . . had
been, that, for certain reasons, illegitimate children are
oftentimes sturdier and brighter than those born in lawful
wedlock . . . The revelation — painful as it was— called up
the recollection of his mother, and, as the buggy jolted
over the road, he added ruefully, 'God bless my mother;
all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her,' and imme-
diately lapsed into silence . . . We rode on for some time
without exchanging a word."

Of this statement, a keen and thorough analyst of Hern-
don was to write that when Herndon related a fact as of his
own observation, it might generally be accepted without
question, while his derivations and guesses regarding the
recollections of others might be full of errors. "As a matter
of fact, the weight of independent evidence supports the
truth of the statement, although proof beyond the possi-
bility of a doubt has never been assembled. Even if it should
be established that Nancy Hanks was born in lawful wed-
lock — a development which does not seem likely — Hern-

192

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

don's reliability would not necessarily be impaired. The
question is so difficult of solution that it would not be
strange if Lincoln himself had been mistaken"

Herndon in 1840 had married Mary Maxcy, the daugh-
ter of Virginia-born James Maxcy, the first town constable
of Springfield. Her quiet beauty was likened to a summer
daisy in a meadow corner. She bore him six children, read
books for him, gave him ease after his restless hours. Their
home held rare happiness, and in a sense, they had a life-
long romance. This home Herndon would leave for the of-
fice which he opened at eight o'clock in the morning. Lin-
coln, when in town, would arrive at nine, and, wrote Hern-
don, "The first thing he did was to pick up a newspaper,
spread himself out on an old sofa, one leg on a chair, and
read aloud, much to my discomfort." Lincoln once ex-
plained to him, "When I read aloud two senses catch the
idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and there-
fore I can remember it better."

Each of them had climbed narrow stairs, crossed a dark
hallway, entered by a glass-paned door, to see worn fa-
miliar things of use — the sofa, the stove, two tables (one
of them somewhat jack-knifed), a secretary with pigeon-
holes and drawers stuffed with papers, an earthenware ink-
pot with quill pens in reach, dingy windows looking out
on a lonesome alley. Here they prepared cases, Lincoln
writing most of the papers introduced in court, Herndon
often doing the heavy research work on authorities and
precedents.

Lincoln's silk stovepipe hat was part of his office, Hern-
don writing that it was his desk and memorandum book,
holding bank book, letters and scribbled ideas placed in
the hatband. To a fellow lawyer Lincoln once wrote of a
lost letter, "I put it in my old hat, and buying a new one
the next day, the old one was set aside, and so, the letter
lost sight of for a time." Yet amid this seeming disorder
the firm of Lincoln & Herndon in 1850 had 18 per cent
of all cases in Sangamon County Circuit Court, in 1853 34
per cent, in 1854 30 per cent, and they rated as a leading
law firm in a city of 6,000 having an exceptionally able set
of attorneys. Herndon had moods of disgust with the law,

Back Home in Springfield 193

once writing, "If you love the stories of murder — rape —
fraud &c. a law office is a good place." The partners both-
ered little with bookkeeping, dividing fees equally, Lincoln
sometimes putting money in an envelope he marked with
the name of the case and "Herndon's half." Herndon only
occasionally went on the circuit. Each appeared in many
cases alone or with other lawyers, the rule being that they
were never to be opposing counsel.

Herndon was bothered at times by Lincoln telling the
same funny story on the same day to one client or politi-
cian after another. He saw, too, in other hours, Lincoln
with a "woestruck face," gazing at the office floor or out
the window, in a dark silence Herndon didn't dare inter-
rupt. He tried to solve Lincoln's melancholy, whether it
went back to heredity, environment, glands, slow blood
circulation, or constipation, or thwarted love. Yet Hern-
don knew that his partner was, in degree, a steadying force
in his own life, a sort of elder brother or affectionate uncle.
When Herndon spoke as a red-hot abolitionist, Lincoln
would tell him, "Billy, you're too rampant and spontane-
ous." He noted Lincoln's walk. "He put the whole foot flat
down on the ground at once, not landing on the heel; he
likewise lifted his foot all at once, not rising from the toe
. . . The whole man, body and mind, worked slowly, as if
it needed oiling." Then came Herndon as a brain special-
ist: "The convolutions of his brain are long; they do not
snap quickly like a short, thick man's brain," which was pre-
tentious guesswork, not commanding the respect that might
be accorded his writing: "The enduring power of Mr. Lin-
coln's brain is wonderful. He can sit and think without
food or rest longer than any man I ever met."

It came hard for Herndon when the boys, Willie and
Tad, came to the office with their father on a Sunday morn-
ing while the mother was at church; the boys pulled books
off shelves, upset ink bottles, threw pencils into the spittoon,
their father at his desk working as though the office were
empty. It lingered with Herndon that Lincoln said to him
more than once, "I shall meet with some terrible end." Out
of what shadowed meditations could such a premonition
come to be spoken? He took Shakespeare in his carpetbag

194

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

on the circuit, it was known, but that wouldn't explain why
one of his original bent would speak lines like Hamlet.
When Joshua Speed said he had a quick mind, he denied it.
"I am slow to learn, and slow to forget . . . My mind is
like a piece of steel — very hard to scratch anything on it,
and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out."

An angry family trying to break a will, a man who with
a knife had cut another man in the eye, a client of Lincoln's
found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years
at hard labor, the first three months in solitary confinement,
another Lincoln client, a one-legged Mexican War veteran
found guilty of robbing the mails of $15,000 in bank notes
and sentenced to ten years — the likes of these came before
Lincoln's eyes, their faces and voices beyond forgetting.

"She charges," he wrote in behalf of Eliza Jane Hel-
mick, "that said complainant, while he yet lived with her,
for the purpose of contriving evidence to procure a divorce
from her, at various times, and in different ways, attempted
to induce different men to make attempts upon the chastity
of your Respondent." He wrote another lawyer of how he
hadn't "pressed to the utmost" his case against a man: "I
am really sorry for him — poor and a cripple as he is." In
several cases he defended whisky sellers — and again at a
trial in DeWitt County attended by more than a hundred
women he defended nine women charged with riot; they
had warned a saloonkeeper to close his place and when he
didn't they smashed barrels and bottles and left him no
whisky to sell; the jury found them guilty but the judge let
them off with a fine of $2.00 each. More often came the
humdrum cases involving properties and payments, estates,
promissory notes, defaults, claims, mortgages, foreclosures,
ejectments.

Little Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 had published a
novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and by the device of dramatiz-
ing a black Christ lashed by a Yankee-born Satan, had led
millions of people to believe that in the Slave States south
of the Ohio River was a monstrous wrong. She ended her
book with a prophecy: "This is an age of the world when
nations are trembling and convulsed. A mighty influence is

Back Home in Springfield 195

abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earth-
quake. And is America safe? Every nation that carries in its
bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements
of this last convulsion."

Lincoln at a Springfield, Illinois, meeting wrote the reso-
lutions of sympathy for Louis Kossuth and Hungarians in
revolution against an arrogant and cruel monarchy. In notes
for possible use, he wrote of "a society of equals" where
every man had a chance. He had heard Southern men de-
clare slaves better off in the South than hired laborers in
the North. He would observe, "There is no permanent class
of hired laborers amongst us. Twenty-five years ago, I was
a hired laborer. The hired laborer of yesterday, labors on
his own account to-day; and will hire others to labor for
him to-morrow . . . Although volume upon volume is writ-
ten to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the
man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave
himself ... As Labor is the common burthen of our race,
so the effort, of some to shift their share of the burthen on
to the shoulders of others, is the great, durable, curse of
the race."

Emerson, the Concord preacher, saw war, revolution, vio-
lence, breeding in the antagonisms of bold, powerful men.
"Vast property, gigantic interests, family connection, webs
of party, cover the land with a network that immensely
multiplies the dangers of war."

Lincoln caught the feel of change in the national air. He
had seen the frontier move far west. He had seen St. Louis,
with its 5,000 people, grow to 74,000 in 20 years, and
Springfield from 700 to 6,000. Senator Douglas was telling
of "a power in this nation greater than either the North or
the South — a growing, increasing, swelling power, that will
be able to speak the law to this nation, and to execute the
law as spoken. That power is the country known as the
great West — the Valley of the Mississippi." The human
inflow from Europe kept coming into Illinois — Germans,
Irish and English by tens of thousands. Fourteen steam-
boats, ice-locked in the Mississippi River near Cairo in the
winter of 1854, were loaded with 2,000 German and Irish
immigrants. Of new and old societies, unions, lodges,

196

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

churches, it seemed that Lincoln belonged only to the Whig
party and the American Colonization Society.

Between 1850 and 1860, the country's 23,000,000 people
become 31,000,000, this being 2,000,000 more than Great
Britain. In ten years 2,600,000 people arrive from overseas,
in a single year 400,000. The East grows 21 per cent, the
South 28 per cent, the Northwest 77 per cent, in popula-
tion. Little towns peep up on the prairies where before were
only gophers and jack rabbits.

Washington wrangles about the public lands, millions of
acres northwest and southwest. Land speculators, interests,
powerful in Washington, for reasons of their own do not
want free land for actual settlers. A few Senators try to get
a free homestead law and fail. Free land bills keep coming
up in Congress.

The transcontinental railroad, the iron-built, ocean-going
steamship, the power-driven factory — the owners and man-
agers of these are to be a new breed of rulers of the earth.
Between seaboard and the Mississippi comes the "iron
horse" hauling pork and grain of the West to factory towns
of the East, to vessels sailing to Europe; the cars return with
sewing machines, churns, scissors, saws, steel tools. New
reaping and threshing machinery comes. Singlehanded, a
farmer gathers the crop on a quarter section. Grain drills,
corn planters, wagons and buggies with springs under the
boxes and seats are bought by the farmers. New churns
and sewing machines help the farmer's wife. Steam fire en-
gines, gas lighting systems, the use of anesthesia, the Hoe
revolving cylinder press, vulcanized rubber, photography,
arrive.

A territory of Kansas is organized, and from slave-soil
Missouri, men with rifles ride over into Kansas and battle
with abolitionists from New England for political control
of Kansas. Emerson peers into years ahead and cries, "The
hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong
enough." On a late afternoon of any autumn day in those
years, Abraham Lincoln in his rattletrap buggy over the
prairie might have been lost deep in the swirl of his
thoughts and his hope to read events to come.

Back Home in Springfield 197

Lincoln bought a book on logic, studied how to untangle
fallacies and derive inexorable conclusions from established
facts. On the circuit when with other lawyers, two in a bed,
eight or ten in one hotel room, he read Euclid by the light
of a candle after others had dropped off to sleep. Herndon
and Lincoln had the same bed one night, and Herndon no-
ticed his partner's legs pushing their feet out beyond the
footboard of the bed, as he held Euclid close to the candle-
light.

John T. Stuart saw Lincoln as a hopeless victim of melan-
choly. "Look at him now," said Stuart, in the McLean
County Courthouse. "I turned a little," wrote Henry C.
Whitney, Lincoln's fellow lawyer at Urbana, "and there be-
held Lincoln sitting alone in the corner . . . wrapped in
gloom." He seemed to be "pursuing in his mind some spe-
cific, sad subject, . . . through various sinuosities, and his
sad face would assume, at times, deeper phases of grief . . .
He was roused by the breaking up of court, when he
emerged . . . like one awakened from sleep."

Herndon once found Lincoln covering sheets of paper
with figures, signs, symbols. He told Herndon he was trying
to square the circle. After a two days' struggle, worn down,
he gave up trying to square the circle.

He penned notes trying to be as absolute as mathematics:
"If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of
right, enslave B., why may not B. snatch the same argu-
ment, and prove equally, that he may enslave A? — You
say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter,
having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this
rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a
fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?
— You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of
the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them?
Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first
man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But,
say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it
it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very
well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to
enslave you." Thus his private memorandum.

He wrote of the legitimate object of government being

198

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

"to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they
can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for
themselves," such as "Making and maintaining roads,
bridges, and the like; providing for the helpless young and
afflicted; common schools; and disposing of deceased men's
property." Military and civil departments were necessary.
"If some men will kill, or beat, or constrain others, or
despoil them of property, by force, fraud, or noncompliance
with contracts, it is a common object with peaceful and
just men to prevent it."

Out of the silent working of his inner life came forces
no one outside of himself could know; they were his secret,
his personality and purpose. He was in the toils of more
than personal ambition. Politely, gently but firmly, he had
told those who wanted him to run for the legislature or for
Congress, that he wasn't in the running.

Chapter 9

Restless Growing America

The California "gold rush" of 1849 and what followed had
the eyes of the world. San Francisco had become a world
port. Sacramento, four lone houses in April 1849, became
in six months a roaring crazy city of 10,000. Ten men in
one week had shaken from the gravel in their hand-screens
a million dollars in gold nuggets. More than once a single
spade had sold for $1,000. Courts and law broke down in
San Francisco and a Committee of Vigilantes took over the
government.

Over the Great Plains moved wagon trains, a traveler
counting 459 wagons in ten miles along the Platte River. A
Peoria newspaper in 1854 counted 1,473 wagons in one
month, movers going to Iowa. In a single week 12,000 im-
migrants arrived on railroad trains in Chicago. Cyrus Mc-

Restless Growing America 199

Cormick's Chicago, factory in 1854 sold 1,558 farming ma-
chines, mostly for both reaping and sowing, and was plan-
ning for 3,000 machines in 1855. The Department of State
reported that Irish immigrants alone had in three years sent
back to the old country nearly $15,000,000 for their kin-
folk. A restless young growing America was moving toward
a future beyond reading.

The peace of the Great Compromise had held up fairly
well, broken by the endless crying of antislavery men
against the new Fugitive Slave Law. The case of the slave,
Anthony Burns, shook the country. He escaped from a Vir-
ginia plantation, stowed away on a ship for Boston, was
arrested, and by a Federal commissioner ordered back to
Virginia. A mob led by a minister broke into the courthouse
to save Burns and in the fighting with Federal officers a
deputy U.S. marshal was killed. Stores closed, doors and
windows were draped in black, crowds lined the streets
when the one lone Negro slave was marched to his Virginia-
bound ship, escorted by dragoons, marines, loaded artillery,
12 companies of infantry, 120 personal friends of the U.S.
marshal carrying drawn swords and loaded pistols. The
affair cost the Government over $40,000. Like incidents,
less dramatic, happened here and there over the country. In
Chicago a fugitive slave was slipped out a courtroom win-
dow and when the Federal commissioner asked, "Where is
the prisoner at the bar?" the answer came, "He is at rest in
the bosom of the community."

Amid these changing scenes and issues, Douglas had be-
come the foremost dramatic leader of the Democratic
party, speaking, as he said, for "Young America" as against
"Old Fogies," meaning Cass, Buchanan and other figures of
hesitation. A younger element of the party boomed him for
President in 1852 and he was only 39 when in the Demo-
cratic national convention on the 30th and 31st ballots he
had more votes than any other candidate. He made his
home in Chicago, where he bought land for a few dollars
and sold one tract for $80,000. To the young University of
Chicago he donated ten acres. He was close to all interests
that wanted a railway to the Pacific. His tenacity had

200

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

brought a rail route from the Great Lakes to the Gulf; the
Illinois Central was thankful to him and let him have pri-
vate cars for travel.

After the death of his wife in early 1853, when he went
back to Congress he was noticed as bitter, bad-tempered, a
sloven in dress, chewing tobacco and careless where he spat.
He went abroad several months, seeing Russia and the Near
East, and came back the oldtime Douglas who could put his
hands on the shoulders of an old colleague or a young pre-
cinct worker and say, as though they were chums, "You —
I count on your help." He was three years later to marry
Adele Cutts, a great-niece of Dolly Madison, a beautiful,
warmhearted woman who proved to be a perfect helpmeet
for a combative and furiously active husband. He made
many long speeches, wrote few letters and those having
little of self-revelation, kept no diary, seemed seldom if
ever to have time for meditations on himself in particular
or the whence and whither of all mankind.

In early 1854 came a bold, challenging action of Douglas
that set the slavery issue boiling in a wild turmoil, Douglas
having predicted, "It will raise a hell of a storm." Now 41,
a battler, magnetic, with flashing blue eyes, chin drawn in,
pivoting, elusive, he made a daring, spectacular play for
reasons better known to himself than any he gave to the
public. His lionlike head, his black pompadour swept back
in waves, his deep bass voice, were seen and heard. Toiling,
sweating, crying, he had coaxed, guided and jammed
through Congress the Nebraska Bill, as it came to be
known. It created two territories, Kansas on the south, Ne-
braska on the north; in each the voters would decide
whether it should be free or slave soil. Nebraska then
stretched far and wide, its area including all or part of the
later states of Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Wyo-
ming and Montana. There, in the future, under "popular
sovereignty," said Douglas, "they could vote slavery up or
down." Southern members had insisted on, and got, a pro-
vision expressly repealing the hitherto sacred Missouri
Compromise; the line it drew between slave and free soil
was wiped out.

As the news went across the country, not in the memory

Restless Growing America 201

of living men had there been such recoils and explosions of
opinion and passion over a political act and idea. Lincoln
was roused as "by the sound of a fire-bell at night." In New
England, 3,050 clergymen signed a widely published me-
morial to the U.S. Senate: "in the name of almighty
god, and in his presence," we "solemnly protest against
the passage of . . . the Nebraska bill." In Chicago 25 clergy-
men signed a like protest, followed by 500 ministers in the
Northwest. Several longtime Democratic party leaders in
Illinois gave it out that they were anti-Nebraska men. Trav-
eling to Illinois, Douglas could see from his car window the
burning of dummies bearing his name; in Ohio some
women managed to present him with 30 pieces of silver. In
Chicago in front of North Market Hall, on the hot night
of September 1, he defied and insulted those against him;
a crowd of 8,000 interrupted with questions, hisses, groans,
boos, catcalls. They howled and hooted him till he looked
at his watch, jammed his silk hat on his head, and left.

Among those who led in hooting Douglas were the Know-
Nothings, members of the secret "Order of the Star Span-
gled Banner." When asked what the order stood for, mem-
bers answered, "I know nothing." Each member on joining
swore he would never vote for a foreigner or a Catholic for
any office. Their slogans were, "Americans must rule Amer-
ica" and "No papacy in the Republic." Of millions of Irish
and German immigrants, a large part were Catholic and
they had become a power in large cities, throwing their
strength most often to the Democrats, such as Douglas,
who were more friendly to them than the Whigs in general.
Two Catholic churches in Massachusetts had been wrecked
and gutted — and a convent burned. A Protestant procession
of 2,000 people in Newark, New Jersey, met an Irish mob
and the fighting left one man dead and many wounded.
Hibernian parades had been broken up by rioting Know-
Nothings. Being secret in their operations, it was hard to
guess what the Know-Nothings would show in the year's
elections. Being openly anti-Nebraska and antislavery, they
had drawn toward them many Democrats and an element
of Whigs.

Before the year closed the Know-Nothings would sur-

202

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

prise the country by electing mayors of Philadelphia and
Washington. In alliance with Free-Soilers and former
Whigs, they were to sweep Massachusetts with 63 per cent
of all ballots, electing a Know-Nothing governor and legis-
lature. They would have swept New York State but for the
longtime proven friendships of Seward and Weed with
groups of foreigners and Catholics. Lincoln gave put no
word publicly but when Know-Nothings called on him he
was reported as saying the red man in breechclout and with
tomahawk was the true native American. "We pushed them
from their homes, and now turn on others not fortunate
enough to come over so early as we or our forefathers." He
told of an Irishman who was asked why he wasn't born in
America, and the answer, "Faith, I wanted to, but me
mither wouldn't let me."

On a State Fair day in Springfield thousands who hated
or loved Douglas stood in the cool night air of October 2 to
see him on the Chenery House porch, torches lighting his
face. His eyes flashed and lips trembled. "I tell you the time
has not yet come when a handful of traitors in our camp
can turn the great State of Illinois, with all her glorious his-
tory and traditions, into a negro-worshiping, negro-equality
community." The next afternoon Douglas spoke three hours
in the Statehouse. Had not the Missouri Compromise been
practically wiped out by the Omnibus Bill of 1850? Was not
the real question whether the people should rule, whether
the voters in a territory should control their own affairs? If
the people of Kansas and Nebraska were able to govern
themselves, they were able to govern a few miserable Ne-
groes. The crowd enjoyed it; cries came, "That's so!" "Hit
'em again." Lincoln comforted a pretty young woman
abolitionist: "Don't bother, young lady. We'll hang the
judge's hide on the fence tomorrow."

The next afternoon Lincoln spoke to the same crowd.
"Wherever slavery is, it has been first introduced without
law." He gave reasons for hating it as a "monstrous injus-
tice," and added: "When southern people tell us they are
no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we; I
acknowledge the fact When it is said that the institution

Restless Growing America 203

exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satis-
factory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I
surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not
know how to do myself . . . What next? Free them, and
make them politically and socially, our equals? My own
feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well
know that those of the great mass of white people will not.
Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judg-
ment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it.
A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be
safely disregarded."

And yet, while he could not say what should be done
about slavery where it was already established and operat-
ing, he was sure it would be wrong to let it spread north.
"Inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to
Nebraska, therefore I must not object to you taking your
slave. Now, I admit this is perfectly logical, if there is no
difference between hogs and negroes." And what should be
done first of all? "The Missouri Compromise ought to be
restored. For the sake of the Union, it ought to be re-
stored." In Peoria 12 days later, he gave much the same
speech to a crowd of thousands, wrote it out for publica-
tion, and it became widely known as the "Peoria Speech."

In the October elections of 1854, anti-Nebraska voters of
all shades — former Whigs and Democrats, Know-Nothings,
Fusionists — won by startling majorities. A combination in
Pennsylvania elected 21 anti-Nebraska Congressmen as
against four Nebraska. A Know-Nothing legislature in
Massachusetts elected a Know-Nothing U.S. Senator.
Maine, for years Democratic, saw the Anti-Nebraska Fu-
sion Party electing a governor and carrying every congres-
sional district, the same break from the past occurring* in
Iowa, Vermont and other states. Anti-Nebraska men rolled
up a majority of 70,000, elected a Congressman in every
Ohio district; they carried all but two districts in Indiana.
Lincoln mentioned in his Peoria speech these sweeping
political smashups, with a changed public opinion. He re-
buked the "desperate assumption" of Douglas: "If a man
will stand up and assert, and repeat, and re-assert, that two
and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of

204

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

argument that can stop him ... In such a case I can only
commend him to the seventy thousand answers just in from
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana."

At meetings in Ripon, Wisconsin, and Jackson, Michigan,
citizens opposed to slavery extension, and coming from all
parties, resolved in favor of a neAv party with a new name
gathering anti-Nebraska Whigs and Democrats, also Free-
Soilers, under one banner, and, "we will cooperate and be
known as Republicans.' " In Wisconsin and Vermont con-
ventions the name Republican was adopted. The New York
Tribune's Whig Almanac designated the 21 Congressmen
from Ohio as Republicans, and in October 1854 Greeley
was writing, "We consider the Whig party a thing of the
past." In several county and congressional districts over
Illinois the name Republican had been adopted, an Ottawa
Democratic paper saying the Republican convention there
was made up of "Whigs, abolitionists, know nothings, sore
heads, and fag ends." \

A group of radical abolitionists met in Springfield Octo-
ber 5 to organize an Illinois Republican party. Herndon,
then calling himself an abolitionist, sat in with the group,
and suddenly went in a hurry to Lincoln, saying, "Go home
at once . . . Drive somewhere into the country and stay till
this thing is over." And Lincoln, sending word to the radi-
cals that he had law business in Tazewell County, drove
away in his one-horse buggy. Herndon wrote, "On grounds
of policy it would not do for him to occupy at that time
such advanced ground as we were taking. On the other
hand, it was equally as dangerous to refuse a speech for the
Abolitionists." Later when Lincoln was named a member
of the new state central committee of the new Republican
party, he declined the honor, as without his authority, and
refused to attend their meetings.

In the November 7 election the Democrats elected only
four of the nine Illinois Congressmen, and to the legislature
only 41 regular Democrats against 59 anti-Nebraska mem-
bers of differing shades. Lincoln wrote the names of all
members in alphabetical order and studied his chances for
election to the seat of U.S. Senator James Shields. Late in
1854 he sent out many letters in the tone of one: "I have

Restless Growing America 205

really got it into my head to try to be United States Sena-
tor; and if I could have your support my chances would be
reasonably good." In February 1855 he watched in the
Statehouse the election for U.S. Senator. He got 45 votes.
Six more would have elected him. The balloting went on,
his vote slumped to 15. The minute came when Lincoln
saw that if he held his 15 loyal votes Governor Joel A.
Matteson, a Douglas and tricky Nebraska Democrat play-
ing what Lincoln termed "a double game," would be
elected. Lincoln begged his steadfast 15 votes to go to
Lyman Trumbull, anti-Nebraska bolter from the Demo-
cratic party. On the tenth ballot Trumbull was elected. The
affair was snarled and shadowed, filled with strategies keen
and subtle, and with treacheries plain and slimy.

Lincoln wrote to a friend: "I regret my defeat moder-
ately, but I am not nervous about it." By not being stubborn
he had won friends. He gave a dinner for all anti-Nebraska
members of the legislature. Mrs. Lincoln had watched the
balloting from the gallery and was bitter about it. Julia
Jayne, the wife of Trumbull, had been bridesmaid at her
wedding; they had joined in writing verse and letters to the
Sangamo Journal, but forever after the night of Trumbull's
election Mrs. Lincoln refused to speak to Julia or to receive
a call from her.

Lincoln wrote to Speed: "I think I am a whig; but others
say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist ... I
now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery. I
am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be?
How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be
in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress
in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation,
we began by declaring 'all men are created equal/ We now
practically read it 'all men are created equal, except ne-
groes* When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read
'all men are created equal, except negroes; and foreigners,
and catholics/ When it comes to this I should prefer emi-
grating to some country where they make no pretence of
loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism
can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypoc-
racy."

206

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Polly, a free Negro woman in Springfield, had a son who
worked on a steamboat to New Orleans where, not having
papers to show he was a free Negro, he was jailed. The
steamboat left without him and after a time he was adver-
tised for sale to pay jail expenses. Polly came to Lincoln
and Herndon about it. They went to Governor Matteson
who said he could do nothing. Lincoln with Herndon and
others raised by subscription the money to pay jail charges,
and brought the boy back to Polly.

In August 1855 Lincoln wrote to Owen Lovejoy, "Not
even you are more anxious to prevent the extension of slav-
ery than I; and yet the political atmosphere is such, just
now, that I fear to do any thing, lest I do wrong." Know-
Nothing elements would be needed to combat the pro-
Nebraska Democrats. "About us here, they [the Know-
Nothings] are mostly my old political and personal friends;
and I have hoped their organization would die out without
the painful necessity of my taking an open stand against
them. Of their principles I think little better than I do of
those of the slavery extensionists. Indeed I do not perceive
how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the
negroes, can join in a league to degrade a class of white
men." Few they were to whom Lincoln could write a letter
of such candor which if published in that hour could do
him harm. A peculiar bond of trust and understanding ran
between him and the rugged Congregational minister over
at Princeton, Illinois, who was a radical antislavery man.

One night in Danville at the McCormick House, the la-
dies' parlor was turned into a bedroom for Judge David
Davis, who had a bed to himself, and for Lincoln and
Henry C. Whitney, who slept two in a bed. Whitney wrote
of it: "I was awakened early — before daylight— by my
companion sitting up in bed, his figure dimly visible by the
ghostly firelight, and talking the wildest and most inco-
herent nonsense all to himself. A stranger to Lincoln would
have supposed he had suddenly gone insane. Of course I
knew Lincoln and his idiosyncrasies, and felt no alarm, so
I listened and laughed. After he had gone on in this way
for, say, five minutes, while I was awake, and I knew not
how long before I was awake, he sprang out of bed, hur-

Restless Growing America 207

riedly washed, and jumped into his clothes, put some wood
on the fire, and then sat in front of it, moodily, dejectedly,
in a most sombre and gloomy spell, till the breakfast bell
rang, when he started, as if from sleep, and went with us
to breakfast."

In 1856, on the Missouri and Kansas border, 200 men,
women and children were shot, stabbed or burned to death
in the fighting between free- and slave-state settlers and
guerrillas. The money loss, in crops burned, cattle and
horses stolen or killed, ran about $2,000,000. Each side
aimed to settle Kansas with voters for its cause. In May, as
the first state convention to organize the Republican party
of Illinois was meeting in Bloomington, the town of Law-
rence, Kansas, had been entered by riding and shooting men
who burned the Free State Hotel, wrecked two printing
offices and looted homes.

Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, speaking on
"Hie Crime Against Kansas," had lashed verbally South
Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler, saying Butler "has
chosen a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always
lovely to him — I mean the harlot, Slavery." Butler had
"with incoherent phrases, discharged the loose expectora-
tion of his speech" on the people of Kansas. "He cannot
open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder." And Con-
gressman Preston Brooks, a nephew of Butler, had walked
into the Senate chamber, and over the head and backbone
of the seated Sumner had rained blows that broke to pieces
a gutta-percha cane, beating his victim near to death. Over
the North raged a fury almost tongue-tied. In the South was
open or secret exultation; the man they hated and loathed
more than any other in Congress had met punishment and
would leave the Senate and suffer years before his wounds
healed.

These events were in the air when political elements of
Illinois and other states were holding conventions to organ-
ize state parties and to get up a national Republican party.
Of delegates at Bloomington about one-fourth were regu-
larly elected; others had appointed themselves. All stripes
of political belief outside of the pro-Nebraska Democratic

208

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

party were there: Whigs, bolting anti-Nebraska Democrats,
Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, abolitionists. Some who came
were afraid that wild-eyed radicals would control.

The convention met in Major's Hall, upstairs over
Humphrey's Cheap Store, near the courthouse square. The
platform denounced Democratic policies and declared Con-
gress had power to stop the extension of slavery and should
use that power. After several delegates spoke, there were
calls for Lincoln. He stood up. There were cries, "Take the
platform," which he did. He observed, according to a Whit-
ney version written many years later, "We are in a trying
time"; then suddenly came the thrust, "Unless popular opin-
ion makes itself very strongly felt, and a change is made in
our present course, blood will flow on account of Nebraska,
and brother's hand will be raised against brother! . . . We
must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on
to perform what we cannot . . . We must not be led by ex-
citement and passion to do that which our sober judgments
would not approve in our cooler moments." He noted that
the delegates had been collected from many different ele-
ments. Yet they were agreed, "Slavery must be kept out of
Kansas,'' The Nebraska Act was usurpation; it would result
in making slavery national. "We are in a fair way to see this
land of boasted freedom converted into a land of slavery in
fact."

A terribly alive man stood before them. Joseph Medill, of
the Chicago Tribune, and other newspaper writers felt
their pencils slip away. Herndon and Whitney had started
to take notes, then forgot they had pencils. Listeners moved
up closer to the speaker. "I read once in a law book, 'A
slave is a human being who is legally not a person but a
thing.' And if the safeguards of liberty are broken down, as
is now attempted, when they have made things of all the
free negroes, how long, think you, before they will begin to
make things of poor white men?"

He summarized history to show that freedom and equal-
ity, sacred to the men of the American Revolution, had be-
come words it was fashionable to sneer at. He rehearsed
current violent events. Should force be met with force? He
could not say. "The time has not yet come, and if we are

Restless Growing America 209

true to ourselves, may never come. Do not mistake that the
ballot is stronger than the bullet." Applause came regularly.
He was saying what the convention wanted said. He was
telling why the Republican party was being organized. As
applause roared and lingered, the orator walked slowly to-
ward the back of the platform, looked at notes in his hand,
took a fresh start and worked toward the front. To Bill
Herndon and others he seemed taller than ever before.
"He's been baptized," said Herndon, hearing Lincoln de-
clare that no matter what was to happen, "We will say to
the Southern disunionists, We won't go out of the Union,
and you shan't!" The delegates rose from their seats, ap-
plauded, stamped, cheered, waved handkerchiefs, threw
hats in the air, ran riot. He was their tongue and voice. He
had deepened the passions and unified the faith of adher-
ents of a partisan cause.

After it was all over, Whitney did the best he could at
making notes of the speech. If Lincoln had written out the
speech the record of it would be accurate and responsible.
But it was known that what he said, if written and printed,
would be taken as wild-eyed and radical, that a published
text of his passionate declarations would bring fierce de-
nunciations and would alienate moderates from his party.
Delegates wrung Lincoln's hand, and William Hopkins of
Grundy burst out, "Lincoln, I never swear, but that was the
damnedest best speech I ever heard."

Anti-Nebraska "Long John" Wentworth, two inches
taller than Lincoln, wrote in the Chicago Democrat, "Abra-
ham Lincoln for an hour and a half held the assemblage
spellbound by the power of his argument, the intense irony
of his invective, the brilliancy of his eloquence. I shall not
mar any bf its n>e proportions by attempting even a synop-
sis of it." He suggested, "Mr. Lincoln must write it out and
let it go before all the people." This advice Lincoln also
heard from others and refused to follow it. The speech
carried drama, irony, anger, storm, and could be twisted
too many ways to please the opposition. He would let it be
a memory.

An Alton editor's brief summary of the speech, at the
time the only one published, caught no single syllable of

210 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

passionate oratory, and closed: "The Black Democracy
were endeavoring to cite Henry Clay to reconcile old Whigs
to their doctrine, and repaid them with the very cheap com-
pliment of National Whigs." Whitney's version, written
many years later, from notes made after the speech, had
Lincoln closing: "While, in all probability, no resort to
force will be needed, our moderation and forbearance will
stand us in good stead when, if ever, we must make an ap-
peal to battle and to the God of Hosts!!" Such a daring and
flaming utterance, in those exact words, may not have come
from Lincoln, but words of equally high and challenging
import came from him that day in Bloomington. He deliv-
ered cold logic that he would have been willing to see in
print. And he broke loose with blazing outbursts in regard
to human freedom and the Union of States, which for that
particular political hour were better kept out of print.

In the McLean County Circuit Court, Lincoln repre-
sented the Illinois Central Railroad, his retainer $200. He
lost his case; the decision was that the railroad must pay a
tax in every county through which it passed. The cost in
taxes would mount into millions and bankrupt the corpora-
tion. Lincoln appealed to the Supreme Court, argued the
case twice, and in January 1856 won a decision reversing
the lower court. He presented to an official at their Chicago
office his bill for $2,000. The official looked at it: "Why,
this is as much as a first-class lawyer would have charged!"
adding it was "as much as Daniel Webster himself would
have charged."

Back on the circuit when he told other lawyers of it, they
didn't know whether to laugh or cry; the corporation had
been saved millions of dollars through Lincoln's victory in
court. Lincoln started a suit against the Illinois Central for
a fee of $5,000. The case was called; the lawyer for the
railroad didn't show up; Lincoln was awarded his $5,000
one morning. When the railroad lawyer arrived and begged
for a retrial, Lincoln was willing. The case was called later,
and Lincoln read a statement signed by six of the highest-
priced lawyers in Illinois that the sum of $5,000 for the

Restless Growing America 211

services rendered in the case "is not unreasonable;" Before
the jury went out he told them he had been paid $200 by
the railroad and they should make the verdict for $4,800.
Which they did.

Thirty-eight days went by and the railroad company
failed to pay the $4,800 fee. An execution was issued di-
recting the sheriff to seize property of the railroad. Then
the fee was paid. And high officers of the railroad ex-
plained, "The payment of so large a fee to a western lawyer
would embarrass the general counsel with the board of
directors in New York."

Lincoln deposited the $4,800 in the Springfield Marine
and Fire Insurance Company, and later, in handing Hern-
don half the fee, he pushed it toward his partner, then held
it back an instant, and said with a smile, "Billy, it seems to
me it will be bad taste on your part to keep saying severe
things I have heard from you about railroads and other cor-
porations. Instead of criticizing them, you and I ought to
thank God for letting this one fall into our hands." And
Herndon wrote, "We both thanked the Lord for letting the
Illinois Central Railroad fall into our hands."

He was more and more trusted with important affairs of
property. The McLean County Bank retained him to bring
suit against the City of Bloomington. In Springfield, the
gasworks asked him to make certain their title to the two
city lots on which they were located, which Lincoln did,
later sending the gasworks a bill for $500.

A caller in his office one day asked Lincoln to use his
influence in a certain legal quarter, offering him $500.
Herndon wrote, "I heard him refuse the $500 over and
over again. I went out and left them together. I suppose
Lincoln got tired of refusing, for he finally took the money;
but he never offered any of it to me; and it was noticeable
that whenever he took money in this way, he never seemed
to consider it his own or mine. In this case, he gave the
money to the Germans in the town, who wanted to buy
themselves a press. A few days after, he said to me in the
coolest way, /Herndon, I gave the Germans $250 of yours
the other day.' *I am glad you did, Mr. Lincoln,' I an-

212

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

swered. Of course I could not say I was glad he took it."

On May 6, 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton rammed into
a pier of the Rock Island Railroad bridge, took fire, and
burned to a total loss, while part of the bridge burned and
tumbled into the river. The owners of the Effie Afton sued
the bridge company for damages. Lincoln represented the
company at the hearing in Chicago, with Judge McLean
presiding. In his argument Lincoln pointed to the growing
travel from east to west being as important as the Missis-
sippi traffic. It was ever growing larger, this east-to-west
traffic, building up new country with a rapidity never before
seen in the history of the world. In his own memory he had
seen Illinois grow from almost empty spaces to a popula-
tion of 1,500,000. One man had as good a right to cross a
river as another had to sail up or down it. He asked if the
products of the boundless, fertile country lying west must
for all time be forced to stop on a western bank, be un-
loaded from the cars and loaded on a boat, and after pas-
sage across the river be reloaded into cars on the other side.
Civilization in the region to the west was at issue. The jury
listened two weeks and were locked up; when they came out
they had agreed to disagree; their action was generally
taken as a victory for railroads, bridges and Chicago, as
against steamboats, rivers and St. Louis.

During noon recess of a case tried in Rock Island, it was
told, Lincoln walked out to the railroad bridge and came to
a boy sitting on the end of a tie with a fishing pole out over
the water. And Lincoln, fresh from the squabbles and chal-
lenges of the courtroom, said to the boy, "Well, I suppose
you know all about this river." And the boy, "Sure, mister,
it was here before I was born and it's been here ever since."
Lincoln smiled, "Well, it's good to be out here where there
is so much fact and so little opinion."

A check for $500 came into Lincoln's hands, thus far
his largest retaining fee. Cyrus H. McCormick of Chicago
was bringing suit against John H. Manny of Rockford,
claiming that Manny's patents, not lawful and valid, in-
fringed on the McCormick rights. If McCormick could win
his case he would stop the Manny factory at Rockford and
get $400,000 as damages. His lawyers were Edward M.

Restless Growing America 213

Dickerson and Reverdy Johnson, while Manny had George
Harding, Edwin M. Stanton, Peter H. Watson and Abraham
Lincoln.

Lincoln went to Rockford, saw the Manny reaper in the
making, and went on to Cincinnati to argue before Judge
McLean. Lincoln's colleague, Edwin M. Stanton, was a
serious owl-eyed man, strict in language, dress, duty. When
his eyes lighted on Lincoln at the Burnet House in Cincin-
nati, wearing heavy boots, loose clothes, farmer-looking, he
used language reported as: "Where did that long-armed
baboon come from?"

Up and down the courtroom walked Lincoln, in his coat
pocket a manuscript of his argument. The moment came
when Stanton told the court that only two arguments would
be made for the defense. Lincoln was out, his carefully
planned speech not delivered. The defense won, though not
by his services. Back in Springfield he divided a $2,000 fee,
half and half, with Herndon, saying he had been "roughly
handled by that man Stanton," and mentioned Judge Mc-
Lean as "an old granny," and, "If you were to point your
finger at him and a darning needle at the same time he
never would know which was the sharpest."

A woman client had Lincoln survey and lay off into lots
a piece of land she owned near the Springfield city limits.
He found that by some mistake the woman had become
owner of three more acres of land than she was entitled to,
and Charles Matheny, the former owner, was the loser of
the three acres. Lincoln notified her she ought to pay the
heirs of Matheny the price per acre .first agreed on. The
woman couldn't see it. Lincoln wrote her again; the Math-
eny heirs were poor and needed the money. And again he
wrote explaining what seemed to him plain justice. One day
the woman sent him payment in full and he hunted up the
heirs and paid them out their money.

Whitney told of a murder case in which Lincoln
"hedged" after getting into it. Leonard Swett and Whitney
had spoken for the defense, and believed they would get a
verdict of acquittal. Then Lincoln spoke to the jury, took
up the facts and the evidence, and was all of a sudden mak-
ing arguments and admissions that spoiled the case for the

214

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

prisoner at the bar. The jury came in with a verdict that
sent the client to the penitentiary for three years. And the
case got to working in Lincoln's mind. Somehow he hadn't
done just right. Having helped get the man in the peniten-
tiary, he worked to get him out, and in a year handed him
a pardon from the governor.

All other law cases were out when Lincoln threw himself
into the defense of William ("Duff") Armstrong, the son
of Hannah Armstrong. Before a coroner's jury a house
painter named Charles Allen from Petersburg swore that
he saw the fight between ten and eleven o'clock at night,
and, by the light of a moon shining nearly straight over
them, he saw Armstrong hit Metzker with a slung shot and
throw away the slung shot which he, Allen, picked up.

In the trial at Beardstown Lincoln aimed to have young
men on the jury; young, hot blood would understand his
case better; the average age of the jurymen as finally picked,
was 23. With each witness Lincoln tried to find some
ground of old acquaintance. "Your name?" he asked one.
"William Killian." "Bill Killian? Tell me, are you the son of
old Jake Killian?" "Yes, sir." "Well, you are a smart boy if
you take after your dad."

Again Allen swore he saw Armstrong by the light of a
moon nearly overhead, on a clear night, hit Metzker with
a slung shot. Nelson Watkins testified that he had been to
camp meeting the day after the fight, that he had with him
a slung shot, and that he had thrown it away because it was
too heavy and bothersome to carry. He had made the slung
shot himself, he testified; he had put an eggshell into the
ground, filled it with lead, poured melted zinc over the lead,
but the two metals wouldn't stick; then he had cut a cover
from a calfskin boot leg, sewed it together with a squirrel-
skin string, using a crooked awl to make the holes; and he
had then cut a strip from groundhog skin that he had
tanned, and fixed it so it would fasten to his wrist.

Lincoln took out his knife, cut the string with which the
cover was sewed, showed it to be squirrel-skin, and then
took out the inside metals and showed they were of two
different sorts that did not stick together — the slung shot
Allen testified he had picked up was identical with the one

Restless Growing America 215

Watkins testified he had made and thrown away. Meantime
he had sent out for an almanac, and when the moment
came he set the courtroom into a buzz of excitement, laugh-
ter, whispering, by showing that, instead of the moon being
in the sky at "about where the sun is at ten o'clock in the
morning," as the leading witness testified, a popular, well-
known family almanac showed that on the night of August
29, 1857, the moon had set and gone down out of sight
three minutes before midnight, or exactly 11:57 p.m. The
almanac raised the question whether there was enough
light by which a murder could be competently and mate-
rially witnessed.

Lincoln told the jury he knew the Armstrongs; the wild
boy, Duff Armstrong, he had held in his arms when Duff
was a baby at Clary's Grove; he could tell good citizens
from bad and if there was anything he was certain of, it was
that the Armstrong people were good people; they were
plain people; they worked for a living; they made their mis-
takes; but they were kindly, loving people, the salt of the
earth. He had told the mother of Duff, "Aunt Hannah, your
son will be free before sundown." And it so happened. As
the jury had filed out to vote, one of the jurymen winked
an eye at Duff, so he afterwards told it.

Lincoln was easygoing sometimes about collecting money
owed to him by clients. John W. Bunn, the Springfield
banker, was asked by a Chicago firm to have a local attor-
ney help them in an attachment suit involving several thou-
sand dollars; Lincoln won the suit and charged $25. The
Chicago firm wrote Bunn, "We asked you to get the best
lawyer in Springfield, and it certainly looks as if you had
secured one of the cheapest."

A lease on a valuable hotel property in Quincy was han-
dled by Lincoln for George P. Floyd, who mailed a check
for $25, Lincoln replying: "You must think I am a high-
priced man. You are too liberal with your money. Fifteen
dollars is enough for the job. I send you a receipt for fifteen
dollars, and return to you a ten-dollar bill." In co-operation
with a Chicago lawyer he saved a farm in Brown County
for Isaac Hawley, a Springfield man, and Hawley had $50
ready to pay a fee; Lincoln smiled into Hawley's face and

216

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

drawled, "Well, Isaac, I think I will charge you about ten
dollars." To another client he said, "I will charge you $25,
and if you think that is too much I will make it less." A
woman gave him a check to push a real-estate claim in
court; he found the claim no good and told the woman on
her next visit to his office that there was no action; she
thanked him, took her papers and was going, when Lincoln
said, "Wait — here is the check you gave me."

In the case of Samuel Short, living near Taylorville, Lin-
coln cleared him of charges of maliciously and feloniously
firing a shotgun at boys stealing watermelons on Short's
farm; Short didn't pay his fee and Lincoln collected it
through a suit in the court of a justice of the peace. Ending
a letter that notified a client his case was won, he wrote,
"As the dutch Justice said when he married folk 'Now, vere
ish my hundred tollars?' " There was a personal tang or
smack in slight things he did. A man asked him for advice
on a point of law and he told the man he'd have to look it
up; meeting the man again, he gave the advice wanted, but
when the man wished to know the fee, Lincoln answered
there would be no fee because it was a point he ought to
have known without lookihg it up.

On Herndon asking him why he was so prompt in always
paying Herndon half the fees, the answer was, "Well, Billy,
there are three reasons: first, unless I did so I might forget
I had collected the money; secondly, I explain to you how
and from whom I received the money, so that you will not
be required to dun the man who paid it; thirdly, if I were to
die you would have no evidence that I had your money."

A client complained to Whitney about the way he and
Lincoln had managed a case; Whitney tried to get Lincoln
to smooth it over with the client, Lincoln's answer being,
"Let him howl." Usually he was calm, bland, easygoing with
other lawyers; but sometimes he wasn't; Amzi McWilliams,
handling a witness on Lincoln's side of a case, called out,
"Oh! No! No!! No!!!" which brought Lincoln undoubling
out of a chair with a slow yelling of, "Oh! Yes! Yes!!
Yes!!!" putting a stop to the bulldozing of the witness.

A horse thief in the Champaign County jail told his local
lawyer, William D. Somers, that he wanted Lincoln to help

Restless Growing America 217

in the defense. When Lincoln and Somers arrived at the
jail they found their client talking with his wife, who was
in a delicate condition of health, Lincoln noticed. When
the client handed Lincoln $10 and said that was all the
money he. had, Lincoln looked at the woman and asked:
"How about your wife? Won't she need this?" The answer
was, "She'll get along somehow," which didn't satisfy Lin-
coln. He handed the woman $5.00, and divided the other
five with Somers.

He had to take losses; once all around the circuit his
cases were for defendants, and he was beaten every time; so
he told Bunn, the banker, in Springfield. And he told of
himself that people had said, without disturbing his self-
respect, "Well, he isn't lawyer enough to hurt him."

Lincoln defended a man who had 35 indictments against
him for obstruction of the public highway. He took to the
Supreme Court of the state a case involving a dispute over
the payment of $3.00 in a hog sale. He became versed in
the questions whether a saloon license can be transferred,
whether damages can be collected from a farmer who starts
a prairie fire that spreads to other farms, whether the di-
vorced wife of a man can compel him to give her custody
of her children and to supply her the means for their sup-
port. A merchant set fire to his stock of goods, collected the
insurance, bought a new stock, and was sued by the insur-
ance company for possession of the new stock. A man and
his wife were threatened with being put off a railroad train
because they refused to pay excess cash fare, claiming that
the station agent had no tickets to their point of destina-
tion; they sued the railroad company. Lincoln's memory
was cross-indexed with tangled human causes.

They had their fun and stories on the circuit. Once in
Champaign County Court Judge Davis absent-mindedly
sentenced a young fellow to seven years in the legislature
of the State of Illinois. Prosecutor Lamon whispered to the
judge, who then changed legislature to penitentiary. Lin-
coln, one morning in Bloomington, meeting a young lawyer
whose case had gone to the jury late the night before, asked
what had become of his case; the young lawyer bemoaned,
"It's gone to hell," and Lincoln, "Oh, well, then you'll see

218

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

it again." Lincoln enjoyed quoting to other lawyers from a
book he had read about a man who far from being a liar
"had such great regard for the truth that he spent most of
his time embellishing it."

To illustrate a point, he would tell a fable: "A man on
foot, with his clothes in a bundle, coming to a stream which
he must ford, made elaborate preparations by stripping off
his garments, adding them to his bundle, and, tying all to
the top of a stick, which enabled him to raise the bundle
high over his head to keep them dry during the crossing. He
then fearlessly waded in and carefully made his way across
the rippling stream, and found it in no place up to his
ankles." In a law case having to do with hogs breaking
through a fence and damaging crops, he told about a fence
so crooked that whenever a hog went through a hole in it,
the hog always came out on the same side from which it
started.

A rich newcomer to Springfield wanted Lincoln to bring
suit against an unlucky, crackbrained lawyer who owed him
$2.50; Lincoln advised him to hold off; he said he would go
to some other lawyer who was more willing. So Lincoln
took the case, collected a $10 fee in advance, entered suit,
hunted up the defendant and handed him half of the $10
and told him to show up in court and pay the debt. Which
was done. And all litigants and the lawyer were satisfied.

On a 36-mile drive one October night, Lincoln, Swett
and his wife, and Whitney were in a two-seated carriage;
dark had come on as they rode into a river-bottom road in
heavy timber with deep ditches alongside; and the horses
and hubs plugged through mud. The driver stopped the
horses; someone would have to go ahead and pilot; he didn't
want to tip over as one of Frink & Walker's stages had
done. Whitney jumped out, Lincoln after him; they rolled
up their trousers, and arm in arm went ahead, calling back
every minute or so. Lincoln sang, "Mortal man with face
of clay, Here tomorrow, gone today," and other verses he
made up. They drove into Danville later, laughing at Octo-
ber night weather and autumn mud.

He made safe, moderate investments. Speculations beck-
oned to others, but not to him. At hotels he took what was

Restless Growing America 219

offered him with no complaint. He told his fellow lawyer
Joe Gillespie he never felt easy when a waiter or a flunky
was around. At a meeting of Republican editors in Decatur,
he said he was a sort of interloper, and told of a woman on
horseback meeting a man on a horse on a narrow trail. The
woman stopped her horse, looked the man over: "Well for
the land's sake, you are the homeliest man I ever saw!"
The man excused himself, "Yes, Ma'am, but I can't help
that," and the woman: "No, I suppose not, but you might
stay at home."

Before posing for an ambrotype he ran his fingers
through his hair to rumple it; on the stump or in jury
speeches his hands wandered over his head and put the hair
in disorder. Always, it was noticed, the linen he wore was
clean; his barbers didn't let the sign of a beard start; he
blacked his own boots. As to haircuts, grammar and techni-
calities, he wasn't so particular. In jury arguments and be-
fore a big crowd in Springfield, he wiped sweat from his
face with a red silk handkerchief.

He read Joe Miller and repeated some of the jokes
though he had a thousand fresher ones of his own; they
sprouted by the waysides of his travel. For lawyers he
would mimic a country justice: "If the court understand
herself and she think she do." And there was John Moore,
driving a yoke of red steers to Bloomington one Saturday,
starting home with a jug, and emptying the jug into himself .
Driving through timber a wheel hit a stump and threw the
pole out of the ring of the yoke. The steers ran away;
Moore slept till morning in the cart, and when he awoke
and looked around, he said, "If my name is John Moore,
I've lost a pair of steers; if my name ain't John Moore, I've
found a cart."

And Lincoln had heard a farmer brag about his hay crop
one year: "We stacked all we could outdoors, and then we
put the rest of it in the barn." On a paper written by a
lawyer, with too many words and pages, he remarked, "It's
like the lazy preacher that used to write long sermons, and
the explanation was, he got to writin' and was too lazy to
stop."

Lincoln and Henry Grove of Peoria were attorneys at

220

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Metamora for the defense of 70-year-old Melissa Goings,
indicted for the murder of her husband, a well-to-do farmer
of 77. Testimony indicated he was choking her and she
broke loose, got a stick of stove wood, and fractured his
skull. The dead man had a name for quarreling and hard
drinking and his last words were, "I expect she has killed
me. If I get over it I will have revenge." Melissa Goings
was held in $1,000 bail. Public feeling ran overwhelmingly
in her favor. Indications were that Lincoln held a confer-
ence with the prosecuting attorney, and that on the day set
for trial Mrs. Goings was granted time for a short confer-
ence with her lawyer, Mr. Lincoln. Then she left the court-
house, was never again seen in Metamora, and the next
day the case against her bondsmen was stricken from the
docket. A court bailiff, Robert T. Cassell, later said that
when he couldn't produce the defendant for trial he accused
Lincoln of "running her off." Lincoln replied, "Oh no, Bob.
I did not run her off. She wanted to know where she could
get a good drink of water, and I told her there was mighty
good water in Tennessee."

Friendships with Swett, Whitney and others on the circuit
grew and deepened for Lincoln, and particularly that with
fair-haired and pink-faced Judge David Davis, six years
younger, five inches shorter, a hundred pounds heavier. A
graduate of Kenyon College, Davis had come west and
grown up with Bloomington. He had a keen eye for land
deals and owned thousand-acre tracts. On his large farm
near Bloomington he had a frame mansion where Lincoln
stayed occasionally. In many ways the destinies of Davis
and Lincoln were to interweave.

Chapter 10

The Deepening Slavery Issue

The Democratic national convention opened June 2, 1856,
in Cincinnati, gave unanimous endorsement to the Nebraska
Act, voted 138 to 120 against a Pacific railway, and after
the 15th ballot went into a deadlock with 168Vi votes for
James Buchanan for President, IIW2 for Douglas, a two-
thirds vote being required to nominate. Douglas sent a let-
ter saying the "embittered state of feeling" was a danger to
the party and as Buchanan had a majority he was entitled
to the nomination. On the 17th ballot Buchanan was nom-
inated by unanimous vote. Buchanan had been away as
minister to England, had taken no hand in the Kansas-
Nebraska mess, and was rated a "safe" candidate. He and
the platform faced to the past. The most human touch in
the platform struck at the Know-Nothings; "a political cru-
sade . . . against Catholics and foreign-born" had no place
in the American system.

A fresher air and new causes moved the first national
Republican convention in Philadelphia in mid-June. The
newly born party's platform faced to the future; no exten-
sion of slavery, admission of Kansas as a Free State, "a rail-
road to the Pacific Ocean, by the most central and prac-
ticable route." No delegates came from the Deep South,
only a few from the Border States; the party was sectional.

The nomination for President went to John C. Fremont;
he had served as U.S. Senator from the Free State of Cali-
fornia; as an explorer and "pathfinder in western wilds he
had made a name for daring and enduring hardship. He
was overly dignified, an egotist, a greenhorn in politics, yet
somehow he had never said or done anything radical that
could harm him or the party. He was nominated by 359
votes, 196 going to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Mc-

222

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Lean. Lincoln had favored the veteran Whig McLean as the
man to draw the votes of the conservative Old Line Whigs.
For Vice-President William L. Dayton of New Jersey, an
able lawyer and former U.S. Senator, was nominated, the
first ballot giving him 259 votes and Abraham Lincoln 110.
The news reaching Lincoln, he laughed that it must be
"some other Lincoln."

A February convention of Know-Nothings in Philadel-
phia had declared that only "native-born citizens" should
hold office, and the foreign-born should vote only after
"continued residence of twenty-one years." This political
convention of the American party took a proslavery stand
endorsing the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, an ant^slavery faction
walking out. Millard Fillmore, while in Europe, was nomi-
nated for President, and coming home, accepted. Fillmore
had been a Whig Vice-President, had become a Whig Presi-
dent on the death of President Taylor, had a strong Whig
following that would vote for him. And Lincoln in letters
and in more than 50 speeches hammered it home that a
Whig vote for Fillmore was a vote against the Republicans
and a vote for Buchanan, the Democrat. He mentioned
Fremont often but never with any slight flowering of praise.
Also he handled Fillmore respectfully and tenderly, with
no belittlement, saying nothing of the Know-Nothings who
created and sponsored Fillmore as a candidate. He kept
quiet about a convention of Old Line Whigs, presided over
by Judge Edward Bates of Missouri, which in September
endorsed Fillmore, "without adopting the peculiar doc-
trines" of the American party.

Lincoln stressed the slavery question most often. "The
slaves of the South, at a moderate estimate, are worth a
thousand million of dollars. Let it be permanently settled
that this property may extend to new territory, without re-
straint, and it greatly enhances, perhaps quite doubles, its
value at once." In Belleville, where Germans were in high
proportion, the Weekly Advocate said that Lincoln referred
to "the noble position" taken by the Germans, and, "When
he called down the blessings of the Almighty on their heads,
a thrill of sympathy and pleasure ran through his whole
audience." The Advocate mentioned Lincoln as "this asso-

The Deepening Slavery Issue 223

date" of Frederick K. F. Hecker and carried banners read-
ing, "Lincoln and Hecker." A revolutionary favoring a con-
stitutional government to replace the monarchy, Hecker had
been exiled from Germany. Hecker's home in St. Clair
County had been burned down while he was making a Fre-
mont speech. Lincoln had raised a fund to rebuild and
wrote Hecker, "I hope you will not decline to accept."

At Galena July 23, 1856, Lincoln went radical. He spoke
there in what was probably the tone of his "Lost Speech."
In no other published speech did he refer to the naked
might and force that could in the future be called into play.
Fillmore in an Albany speech had charged that if the Re-
publicans elected a President the event would dissolve the
Union. "Who are the disunionists, you or we?" Lincoln
asked. "We, the majority, would not strive to dissolve the
Union; and if any attempt is made it must be by you, who
so loudly stigmatize us as disunionists. But the Union, in
any event, won't be dissolved. We don't want to dissolve it,
and if you attempt it, we won't let you. With the purse and
sword, the army and navy and treasury in our hands, and at
our command, you couldn't do it. This Government would
be very weak, indeed, if a majority, with a disciplined army
and navy, and a well-filled treasury, could not preserve it-
self, when attacked by an unarmed, undisciplined, unorgan-
ized minority. All this talk about the dissolution of the
Union is humbug — nothing but folly. We won't dissolve
the Union, and you shan't" Thus it was published in Ga-
lena and Springfield newspapers.

Of his day at Dixon, the Amboy Times said Lincoln "is
about six feet high, crooked-legged, stoop-shouldered,
spare-built, and anything but handsome in the face," but
"as a close observer and cogent reasoner, he has few equals
and perhaps no superior in the world ... He attacks no
man's character or motives, but fights with arguments." He
spoke at Princeton with Lovejoy who was running for Con-
gress, and at several meetings was joined with Senator
Trumbull and William "Deacon" Bross of the Chicago
Daily Democratic Press. He spoke at Atlanta (Illinois) in
early September and again in late October. At a Shelbyville
rally of Democrats, he debated with a local leader, the

224 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Register at Springfield saying his three-hour speech "was
prosy and dull ... all about 'freedom,' 'liberty' and niggers.
He . . . dodged every issue."

His law practice got little of his time as he rode on trains,
in buggies and wagons, to speak at many points including
Bloomington, Urbana, Sterling, Paris, Grand View, Charles-
ton, Oregon, Vandalia, Decatur, Lacon, the State Fair at
Alton, Ottawa, Joliet, Peoria, Clinton, Pittsfield, Jackson-
ville, four speeches in Springfield, occasionally two speeches
in one day. A crowd of 10,000 heard him in Kalamazoo,
Michigan, where an abolitionist wrote he was "far too con-
servative and Union-loving."

In his own home Lincoln's arguments failed. Mrs. Lin-
coln wrote to a sister: "My weak woman's heart was too
Southern in feeling to sympathize with any but Fillmore
... he made so good a President & is so just a man & feels
the necessity of keeping foreigners within bounds."

When the October and November election returns were
all in, Buchanan had 174 electoral votes, Fremont 114,
Fillmore 8. The popular vote was 1,838,169 for Buchanan,
1,341,264 for Fremont, 874,534 for Fillmore. Buchanan
carried all the Slave States except Maryland, which Fill-
more carried. Lincoln's fears of the Fillmore vote were seen
in Illinois where the vote was 105,000 for Buchanan, 96,000
for Fremont, and 37,000 for Fillmore. Yet there was com-
fort. The Republicans had elected a Mexican War veteran,
Colonel William H. Bissell, governor, and the state ticket
had swept in.

The New York Times and the Evening Post reported that
$150,000 was sent into Pennsylvania from the slaveholding
states; that August Belmont of New York had contributed
$50,000 for the Democrats; and that other Wall Street
bankers and brokers, fearing disorder and damage to busi-
ness from disunion, raised still another $100,000. "Very
nearly $500,000" was spent by the Democrats, the New
York Times estimated, while the Republican expenses were
somewhat less. Enough was known to show that behind the
Pennsylvania contest were special interests paying big
money toward winning that state.

At a Chicago banquet Lincoln spoke the toast: "The

The Deepening Slavery Issue 225

Union— the North will maintain it— the South will not de-
part therefrom." All who didn't vote for Buchanan made a
majority of 400,000. "We were divided between Fremont
and Fillmore. Can we not come together, for the future . . .
Let bygones be bygones. Let past differences, as nothing
be." The central idea should be not "all citizens as citizens
are equal" but the broader and better "all men are created
equal." He was sure, "The human heart is with us — God
is with us."

On March 6, 1857, in the U.S. Supreme Court room on
the ground floor of the north wing of the Capitol, a hushed
crowd listened to get every word read for three hours from
a document by a man out of the past, an 81-year-old man,
thin of body and furrowed of face, frail and fading, his
voice at times a whisper. He had been Attorney General
and Secretary of the Treasury under President Jackson who
appointed him Chief Justice. He was Roger Brooke Taney,
Maryland-born, a devout Catholic, free from scandal,
highly respected in his profession, one lawyer terming
him "apostolic" in conduct. He came from the tobacco-
planting, slaveholding tidewater strip of Maryland but he
had freed the slaves he inherited, except two or three too
old to work whom he supported. At this time he was not yet
over the shock of his wife's death from yellow fever and
the death the next day of their last child, a beloved and
beautiful daughter. He read for three hours the Supreme
Court decision in the case of Dred Scott, a slave suing for
freedom because he had been taken into territory where
slavery was illegal under the Missouri Compromise; the
Supreme Court of Missouri had sent him back into slavery
because he had voluntarily returned to a Slave State. Four
of the nine judges of the U.S. Supreme Court dissented, five
being from Slave States. The decision declared that Con-
gress did not have power to prohibit slavery in the Terri-
tories; the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional; a
slave Was property and if a slaveowner took his property
into a territory where the U.S. Constitution was the high
law, his property could not be taken from him; a Negro
slave or a free Negro whose ancestors were slaves, could

226

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

not become a U.S. citizen. Negroes "were not intended to
be included under the word 'citizens' " in the Constitution.
"They had for more than a century before been regarded
as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to asso-
ciate with the white race, either in social or political rela-
tions; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might
justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He
was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of
merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by
it." Quoting from the Declaration of Independence "that
all men are created equal," Taney read: "The general words
above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human
family . . . But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved
African race were not intended to be included."

Taney had hoped good would come from this decision
but it set the slavery question seething. The New York Trib-
une said 6,000,000 people in the South had more weight in
the Supreme Court than 16,000,000 people in the Free
States. Lincoln, from now on for years, was to stress more
than ever what he believed the Declaration of Independence
meant by the clause "that all men are created equal." The
question would recur, "If those who wrote and adopted the
Constitution believed slavery to be a good thing, why did
they insert a provision prohibiting the slave trade after the
year 1808?" Into Lincoln's speech was to come more often
that phrase "the Family of Man" as though mankind has
unity and dignity.

Douglas in Springfield in June spoke for the court's deci-
sion. "Whoever resists the final decision of the highest judi-
cial tribunal aims a deadly blow at our whole republican
system of government." Lincoln two weeks later replied,
"We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its
own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to
over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it." Lincoln then
quoted from a message of President Jackson in open re-
sistance to a Supreme Court decision against a national
bank, remarking, "Again and again have I heard Judge
Douglas denounce that bank decision, and applaud Gen.
Jackson for disregarding it."

The Deepening Slavery Issue 227

He mentioned Taney's lengthy insistence "that negroes
were no part of the people" who made the Declaration of
Independence or the Constitution. Lincoln then quoted
from a dissenting court opinion showing that in five of the
13 original states, free Negroes were voters. He read from
Douglas' speech that the signers of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence "referred to the white race alone, and not to the
African, when they declared all men to have been created
equal — they were speaking of British subjects on this conti-
nent being equal to British subjects born and residing in
Great Britain." Thus, said Lincoln, not only Negroes but,
the "French, Germans and other white people of the world
are all gone to pot along with the Judge's inferior races."

Of course the Declaration signers did not intend to de-
clare "all men equal in all respects" but they did consider
all men equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which
are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." He men-
tioned Douglas being "horrified at the thought of mixing
blood by the white ana 1 black races," and commented, "In
1850 there were in the United States, 405,523 mulattoes.
Very few of these are the offspring of whites and free
blacks; nearly all have sprung from black slaves and white
masters ... In 1850 there were in the free states, 56,649
mulattoes; but for the most part they were not born there —
they came from the slave States, ready made up. In the same
year the slave States had 348,874 mulattoes all of home pro-
duction . . . Could we have had our way, the chances of
these black girls, ever mixing their blood with that of white
people, would have been diminished at least to the extent
that it could not have been done without their consent. But
Judge Douglas is delighted to have them decided to be
slaves."

Taney assumed "that the public estimate of the black
man is more favorable now than it was in the days of the
Revolution" yet in states where formerly the free Negro
could vote, that right had been taken away. More and more
state constitutions forbade the legislature to abolish slavery
or slaveowners to free slaves. Of the chattel slave Lincoln
spoke a fateful and strangely cadenced meditation:

228

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining
against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows,
and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day
is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison
house; they have searched his person, and left no pry-
ing instrument with him. One after another they have
closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they
have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hun-
dred keys, which can never be unlocked without the
concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a
hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred
different and distant places; and they stand musing as
to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and
matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of
his escape more complete than it is.

Never ending for months had been the unrest and the
high crying over "Bleeding Kansas." Between November 5,
1855, and December 1, 1856, about 200 persons had been
killed and far more wounded from guns and knives. The
Emigrant Aid Society, with large eastern funds, had sent
out thousands of antislavery settlers and the legislature was
strongly antislavery. But by registration trickery in test
oaths, by thousands of ballots from counties having only a
few score of settlers, by threats of violence, and by refusal
of thousands of antislavery voters to vote in a special elec-
tion where they said their votes wouldn't be counted, the
proslavery party "elected" a constitutional convention
which met in Lecompton under Federal troop guard. The
Lecompton constitution which they wrote, proslavery in its
mumbo-jumbo clauses, was sent to Washington for approval
by Congress.

While the debate dragged on for months in Congress,
President Pierce sent two governors to Kansas, Buchanan
sent another and another, and each failed at bringing order
and peace. John W. Geary and Robert J. Walker were, in
the aftermath, estimated to have been shrewd, keen and fair
umpires in meeting demands from the desperate proslavery
men who saw themselves more and more with every month

The Deepening Slavery Issue 229

outnumbered by antislavery settlers and immigrants — and
whenever a! fair election was held the proslavery party lost.
A congressional committee went to Kansas, heard hundreds
of witnesses land its report ran 1,206 pages. Only a long
story, reciting election frauds, disputes, bickerings, burnings
of houses and barns, shooting and stabbing affairs could
begin to picture the tragic and moaning chaos of Kansas.
Poll books stolen, election judges driven from their seats,
illegal ballots by hundreds, voters coming to the polls hear-
ing men with guns and knives, "Cut his throat!" 'Tear his
heart out!" — [the witnesses gave names, dates, places.

Guerrillas,! bushwackers, roving outlaw gangs were com-
mon after the "Pottawatomie Creek Massacre." Tall,
bearded John Brown, 56 years old, haunted by five free-
state men killed, made a decision. He would kill five slave-
state men, saying to one of his men, Townley, who didn't
like the idea; "I have no choice. It has been decreed by
Almighty God, ordained from eternity, that I should make
an example of these men," On the night of May 24, 1857,
he took two men and his four obedient sons, Owen, Fred-
erick, Salmon and Oliver, each with a rifle, pistol and cut-
lass, and they went to three different cabins. In the Doyle
cabin, the wife and mother begged to be let alone, but out
into the night they dragged her husband and two sons,
found next morning on the grass 200 yards from the cabin,
the father shpt in the head and stabbed in the breast, one
son with arms and fingers cut off and a hole in his throat,
the other son with holes in side, head and jaw. At Wilkin-
son's cabin past midnight they forced him to open the door,
heard his sick wife plead, but he was found next day dead,
with gashes in head and side. At the third cabin they took
William Sherman who was found next morning with his
skull split open and left hand cut off. The butchery was
done mainly with two-edged cutlasses Brown had brought
from Ohio.

Over the country in press and pulpit, on the platform, on
sidewalks and in cigar stores and saloons, each side made its
claims on the basis of distorted and incomplete reports.
The sad fact that didn't come out till complete evidence was

230

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

in made it clear that the victims slaughtered so coldly were
merely plain illiterate farmers making a scant living and
definitely not proslavery agitators. One son of Brown who
didn't go along asked his father, "Did you have anything to
do with that bloody affair on the Pottawatomie?" And John
Brown: "I approved of it." The son: "Whoever did it, the
act was uncalled for and wicked." And John Brown: "God
is my judge. The people of Kansas will yet justify my
course."

What with governors appointed by Pierce and Buchanan
and more than a thousand U.S. Regular troops in Kansas,
disorder and violence there slowed down, but in Washington
in December 1857 the Lecompton constitution split the
Democratic party wide open. At a coming election in Kan-
sas the voters were to ballot, not on the constitution a rump
convention had adopted, but on the single question of
whether they adopted the constitution "with slavery" or
"without slavery." Buchanan favored this election.

Douglas, before crowded galleries, made one of his
great dramatic speeches. He denied the President's assertion
that the Nebraska Act had carried an obligation merely to
submit the slavery question and not the whole constitution.
The election now arranged for this December in Kansas,
said Douglas, offered Louis Napoleon's choice: Vote yes
and be protected, vote no and be shot. Those in favor of it
could vote for it, those against it couldn't vote at all. He
had asked men who framed the Lecompton constitution
about it. 'They said that if they allowed a negative vote, the
constitution would have been voted down by an overwhelm-
ing majority, and hence the fellows shall not be allowed
to vote at all. [laughter] ... If this constitution is to be
forced down our throats, under a mode of submission that
is a mockery and insult, I will resist it to the last." This
speech was in a political year when the Boston scholar,
George Ticknor, wrote to an English friend that American
politics is "completely inexplicable."

In the eyes of some Republican leaders in the east Doug-
las became a hero; they suggested that Illinois Republicans
in 1858 should support Douglas for Senator. Lincoln wrote
to Trumbull in late December 1857: "What does the New-

The Great Debates

231

York Tribune mean by it's constant eulogising, and admir-
ing, and magnifying Douglas? . . . Have they concluded
that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted
by sacrificing us here in Illinois? ... I am not complaining.
I only wish a fair understanding."

Three months later when Buchanan was throwing out of
office men put in by Douglas, postmasters, marshals, land
and mail agents, Herndon wrote to Trumbull, "Lincoln
and I are glad to death that Douglas has been crushed."
But Douglas was far from crushed. With his Democratic
following in Congress, joined with Republicans, he defeated
Buchanan's proslavery measures for Kansas. Over the na-
tion and in a large segment of his party Douglas had never
before had such a peculiarly high and honorable standing.
Many, however, in Republican and other circles, held that
he was no particular hero in having done what he had to
do; when Buchanan wanted to make a mockery of "popu-
lar sovereignty," his only course was to oppose Buchanan,
even if it should smash party unity. He kept on saying he
didn't care "whether slavery was voted up or down," and
in that posture he was the same old Douglas.

Meantime the country was still staggering under the fi-
nancial panic of 1857 with its bank wrecks, tumbling
stocks, property value shrinkages. Processions of thousands
of men marched in the Northern large cities with banners
reading: "Hunger Is a Sharp Thorn" and "We Want Work."

Chapter 11

The Great Debates

The political letters of Lincoln early in 1858 showed more
and more a rare skill in the management of men. He wrote
Lovejoy that he had been in Lovejoy's district and the dan-
ger had been that the Democrats "would wheedle some re-
publican to run against you." The letter was strictly confi-

232

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

dential, "not that there is anything wrong in it; but that I
have some highly valued friends who would not like me any
the better for writing it." He wrote in other letters that he
was not "setting stake" against Seward, that Greeley was
honest though "a drag upon us," that the enemy trick was
"to try to excite all sorts of suspicions and jealosies amongst
us," and that "we need nothing so much as to get rid of un-
just suspicions of one another." He wrote to Norman B.
Judd, the Chicago railroad and corporation lawyer who was
chairman of the state central committee, that if Herndon
had been talking of Judd being "treacherous," he could
promise it wouldn't be repeated. He wrote to Congressman
Elihu B. Washburne that he never did believe rumors afloat
about Washburne going for Douglas and, "I am satisfied
you have done no wrong, and nobody has intended any
wrong to you."

To another he wrote June 1 that he supposed it wasn't
"necessary" that county conventions should make known
their choice for U.S. Senator, though Lincoln must have
known that an amazing number of county conventions
would name him. The Chicago Tribune said on June 14
that the unprecedented action of 95 county Republican
conventions endorsing Lincoln was a "remonstrance against
outside intermeddling" by Greeley and easterners favoring
Douglas.

Many Republicans were saying when their state conven-
tion met in Springfield June 16, 1858, "We know Douglas,
we have fought him for years, and now we're going to give
him the run of his life." On a unanimous vote the resolution
passed, saying, "Abraham Lincoln is the first and only
^choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the U.S. Senate
as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas." In the evening in
the hall of the House of Representatives, Lincoln came,
bowed to applause and cheers, murmured, "Mr. President
and Gentlemen of the convention." Then he read a speech
from manuscript. He had worked harder on it, revised it
with more care, than any other speech in his life; he had
read it the evening before to a group of party leaders who
advised him not to deliver it. Now he read:

"If we could first know where we are, and whither we

The Great Debates

233

are tending, jwe could better judge what to do, and how to
do it. We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was
initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of
putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of
that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has
constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, un-
til a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. 'A house
divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this govern-
ment cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect
the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other."

This was so plain that two farmers fixing fences on a
rainy morning could talk it over. The speaker read on:
"Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further
spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest
in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction;
or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become
alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as
well as South." He put together this and that circumstance
and argued that while on the face of them the people could
not be sure there was a conspiracy on foot to nationalize
slavery, yet explanations were required. "Put that and that
together, and we have another nice little niche, which we
may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court deci-
sion, declaring that the Constitution of the United States
does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits . . .
Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike
lawful in all the States." What interested the country most,
as many newspapers published the speech in full, was its
opening paragraph. It became known as the "House Di-
vided" speech. It went far.

A court official in Springfield once asked Lincoln what
special ability was most valuable for a winning politican,
and quoted Lincoln's answer: "To be able to raise a cause
which will produce an effect, and then fight the effect."

Douglas in Washington told a group of Republicans,
"You have nominated a very able and a very honest man."
To John W. Forney he said: "I shall have my hands full.

234

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Lincoln is the strong man of his party, the best stump
speaker in the West." And again, "Of all the damned Whig
rascals about Springfield, Abe Lincoln is the ablest and the
most honest."

Douglas started west in June, his daily movements
watched by the country. The Chicago Times reprinted from
the Philadelphia Press: "Senator Douglas, accompanied by
his beautiful and accomplished wife, arrived at the Girard
House, en route for Chicago." Sixty miles out from Chi-
cago, a special Illinois Central train with a brass band, flags
and pennants met the Douglas party July 9 and escorted
the statesman to Chicago. As he stepped out on the Lake
Street balcony of the Tremont House that night, rockets
and red fire lit the street. The crowd in the street was get-
ting over a fight with hack drivers who had tried to plow
through the mass of people and deliver guests at the Tre-
mont House. One man was knocked down with the butt
end of a whip, one driver pulled off his seat three times.
As horses, people, and hack drivers were untangled, Judge
Douglas began an hour and a half speech.

Lincoln heard Douglas refer to him as "a kind, amiable,
and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen and an honorable
opponent." He heard Douglas say to the swarming thou-
sands on the street: "Mr. Lincoln advocates boldly and
clearly a war of sections, a war of the North against the
South, of the free States against the slave States — a war of
extermination — to be continued relentlessly until the one
or the other shall be subdued, and all the States shall either
become free or become slave."

The next night Lincoln spoke from the same Tremont
House balcony to a crowd somewhat smaller; rockets
blazed; the brass band of the German Republican Club
from the Seventh Ward rendered music. And amid much
on issues of the day Lincoln said: "I do not pretend that
I would not like to go to the United States Senate, I make
no such hypocritical pretense, but I do say to you that in
this mighty issue, it is nothing to you — nothing to the mass
of the people of the nation — whether or not Judge Douglas
or myself shall ever be heard of after this night."

The Great Debates

235

It was in this same month that A. P. Chapman wrote
Lincoln of "Grand Mother Lincoln" (Sarah Bush) doing
well, and, "I often take my Republican papers and read
Extracts from them that Eulogise you you can hardly form
an idea how proud it makes her. She often says Abram
was always her best child & that he always treated her like
a son. I told her I was a going to write you to day & and
she says tell you she sent a heap of love to you & wants to
see you once more very much ..."

Lincoln wrote a challenge to debate and Douglas ac-
cepted. The two men would meet on platforms and clash
on issues in cities in seven different parts of the state, all
Illinois watching, the whole country listening. By the short-
hand writing newly invented, reporters would give the coun-
try "full phonographic verbatim reports," newspapers told
their readers.

In the Ottawa public square 12,000 listeners sat or stood
in a broiling summer sun August 21 for the first debate.
For three hours they listened. A train of 17 cars had come
from Chicago. By train, boat, wagon, buggy and afoot
people had arrived, waved flags, paraded and escorted their
heroes.

Acres of people listened and, the speaking ended, they
surged around their heroes and formed escorts. A dozen
grinning Republicans lifted Lincoln to their shoulders, and
a Republican crowd headed by a brass band saw him car-
ried to Mayor Glover's home. "With his long arms about
his carriers' shoulders, his long legs dangling nearly to the
ground, his long face was an incessant contortion to wear a
winning smile that succeeded in being only ghastly," said a
Democratic newspaper. The Philadelphia Press reporter
noted of Lincoln: "Poor fellow! he was writhing in the pow-
erful grasp of an intellectual giant. His speech amounted
to nothing." The New York Evening Post reporter wrote:
"In repose, I must confess that 'Long Abe's' appearance is
not comely. But stir him up and the fire of genius plays on
every feature. Listening to him, calmly and unprejudiced,
I was convinced that he has no superior as a stump
speaker."

236 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Next came Freeport, far in the northwestern corner of
Illinois. A torchlight procession met Douglas; the Chicago
Times counted 1,000 torches, the Chicago Press and Trib-
une 74. Lincoln rode to the speaking stand in a covered
wagon drawn by six big white horses. Fifteen thousand
people sat and stood listening through three hours of
cloudy, chilly weather; mist and a fine drizzle drifted across
the air. Some had come on the new sleeping cars from
Chicago the night before. One train on the Galena road
had 16 cars and 1,000 passengers.

Then debaters and shorthand reporters dropped south
300 miles, to a point south of Richmond, Virginia. The
Jonesboro crowd numbered about 1,400 — most of them
rather cool about the great debate. The place was on land
wedged between the Slave States of Kentucky and Mis-
souri; several carloads of passengers had come from those
states to listen. The Chicago Times noted: "The enthu-
siasm in behalf of Douglas is intense; there is but one pur-
pose, to reelect him to the Senate where he has won for
himself and the State such imperishable renown." As to
Lincoln's remarks, the Louisville Journal noted: "Let no
one omit to read them. They are searching, scathing, stun-
ning. They belong to what some one has graphically styled
the tomahawking species."

Three days later debaters and reporters were up at
Charleston, and there, said the Missouri Republican, "The
joint discussion between the Tall Sucker and the Little
Giant came off according to programme." Twelve thousand
people came to the county fairgrounds— and listened.

On October 7, in the itinerary, came Galesburg, in Knox
County. Twenty thousand people and more sat and stood
hearing Lincoln and Douglas speak while a raw northwest
wind tore flags and banners to rags. The damp air chilled
the bones of those who forgot their overcoats. For three
hours the two debaters spoke to people who buttoned their
coats tighter and listened. They had come from the banks
of the Cedar Fork Creek, the Spoon River, the Illinois,
Rock and Mississippi Rivers, many with hands toughened
on the plow handles, legs with hard, bunched muscles from
tramping the clods behind a plow team. With ruddy and

The Great Debates

237

wind-bitten faces they were of the earth; they could stand
the raw winds when there was something worth hearing and
remembering.

Six days later, in Quincy, on the Mississippi River,
12,000 people came from Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and sat
and stood three hours hearing the debaters. And two days
later, farther down river, looking from free-soil Illinois
across to slave-soil Missouri, the debaters had their final
match, in Alton, before 6,000 listeners.

One young man, Francis Grierson, kept a sharp impres-
sion of Lincoln at Alton. He "rose from his seat, stretched
his long, bony limbs upward as if to get them into working
order, and stood like some solitary pine on a lonely sum-
mit."

Two men had spoken in Illinois to audiences surpassing
any in past American history in size and in eagerness to
hear. Yet they also spoke to the nation. The main points
of the debates reached millions of readers. Newspapers in
the larger cities printed the reports in full. A book of pas-
sion, an almanac of American visions, victories, defeats, a
catechism of national thought and hope, were in the para-
graphs of the debates. A powerful fragment of America
breathed in Douglas' saying at Quincy: "Let each State
mind its own business and let its neighbors alone! . . . If
we will stand by that principle, then Mr. Lincoln will find
that this republic can exist forever divided into free and
slave States . . . Stand by that great principle and we can
go on as we have done, increasing in wealth, in popula-
tion, in power, and in all the elements of greatness, until
we shall be the admiration and terror of the world, . . . until
we make this continent one ocean-bound republic."

Those who wished quiet about the slavery question, and
those who didn't, understood Lincoln's inquiry: "You say
it [slavery] is wrong; but don't you constantly . . . argue
that this is not the right place to oppose it? You say it must
not be opposed in the free States, because slavery is not
here; it must not be opposed in the slave States, because it
is there; it must not be opposed in politics, because that
will make a fuss; it must not be opposed in the pulpit, be-

238

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

cause it is not religion. Then where is the place to oppose
it? There is no suitable place to oppose it"

So many could respond to the Lincoln view: "Judge
Douglas will have it that I want a negro wife. He never can
be brought to understand that there is any middle ground on
this subject I have lived until my fiftieth year, and have
never had a negro woman either for a slave or a wife, and
I think I can live fifty centuries, for that matter, without
having had one for either." Pointing to the Supreme Court
decision that slaves as property could not be voted out of
new territories, Lincoln said, "His [Douglas*] Supreme
Court cooperating with him, has squatted his Squatter Sov-
ereignty out." The argument had got down as thin as
"soup made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had
starved to death."

Douglas said he would not be brutal. "Humanity re-
quires, and Christianity commands that you shall extend to
every inferior being, and every dependent being, all the
privileges, immunities and advantages which can be granted
to them consistent with the safety of society." America
was a young and growing nation. "It swarms as often as a
hive of bees ... In less than fifteen years, if the same prog-
ress that has distinguished this country for the last fifteen
years continues, every foot of vacant land between this and
the Pacific ocean, owned by the United States, will be oc-
cupied . . . And just as fast as our interests and our des-
tiny require additional territory in the north, in the south,
or on the islands of the ocean, I am for it, and when we
acquire it will leave the people, . . . free to do as they
please on the subject of slavery and every other question."

Lincoln cited a Supreme Court decision as "one of the
thousand things constantly done to prepare the public
mind to make property, and nothing but property, of the
negro in all the states of this Union." Why was slavery
referred to in "covert language" and not mentioned plainly
and openly in the U.S. Constitution? Why were the words
"negro" and "slavery" left out? Was it not always the single
issue of quarrels? "Does it not enter into the churches
and rend them asunder? What divided the great Methodist
Church into two parts, North and South? What has raised

The Great Debates

239

this constant disturbance in every Presbyterian General As-
sembly that meets?" It was not politicians; this fact and
issue of slavery operated on the minds of men and divided
them in every avenue of society, in politics, religion, liter-
ature, morals. "That is the issue that will continue in this
country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and
myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these
two principles . . . The one is the common right of hu-
manity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same
. . . spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and
I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from
the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of
his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from
one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race,
it is the same tyrannical principle."

At Freeport Lincoln put a series of questions to Douglas,
one of them, "Can the people of a United States Territory,
in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the
United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the
formation of a State Constitution?" The answer of Douglas
amounted to saying, "Yes." It raised a storm of opposition
to him in the South, and lost him blocks of northern Dem-
ocratic friends who wanted to maintain connections in the
South.

When Douglas twisted his antislavery position into one
of race equality, Lincoln replied it was an arrangement of
words by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a
chestnut horse. At Charleston he shook a finger at a man's
face: "I assert that you are here to-day, and you undertake
to prove me a liar by showing that you were in Mattoon
yesterday. I say that you took your hat off your head, and
you prove me a liar by putting it on your head. That is the
whole force of Douglas' argument."

Of Lincoln's face in a hotel room in Quincy, David R.
Locke wrote: "I never saw a more thoughtful face. I never
saw a more dignified face. I never saw so sad a face." Nor
could Locke forget that Lincoln had his boots off and ex-
plained, "I like to give my feet a chance to breathe."

On October 30, several thousand farmers out around
Springfield hitched up their teams and drove into town to a

240

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Republican rally; Lincoln was to make his last speech of
the campaign. Nine cars had come from Jacksonville and
way stations. The Chicago & Alton brought 32 cars from
McLean and Logan Counties, seats and aisles full, tops of
the cars and two engine pilots crowded with passengers.
Ten thousand swarmed around the Statehouse square,
waves of people facing toward the speakers' stand.

Lincoln began his speech about two o'clock: "I stand
here surrounded by friends — some political, all personal
friends, I trust. May I be indulged, iq this closing scene, to
say a few words of myself? I have borne a laborious, and,
in some respects to myself, a painful part in the contest."

He knew Galesburg to the north would vote about two
to one for him and Jonesboro to the south three to one
against him. He faced toward Jonesboro and all the South
rather than Galesburg and the North. "The legal right of
the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have con-
stantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere
with their institution in the states, I have constantly denied
... To the best of my judgment I have labored for, and not
against the Union."

The issues were so immense, the required decisions so
delicate, it was an hour for considerations beyond the per-
sonal. "As I have not felt, so I have not expressed any
harsh sentiment towards our Southern bretheren. I have
constantly declared, as I really believed, the only differ-
ence between them and us, is the difference of circum-
stances. I have meant to assail the motives of no party, or
individual; and if I have, in any instance (of which I am
not conscious) departed from my purpose, I regret it."

Then came words strange with a curious bittersweet. "I
have said that in some respects the contest has been pain-
ful to me. Myself, and those with whom I act have been
constantly accused of a purpose to destroy the union; and
bespattered with every immaginable odious epithet; and
some who were friends, as it were but yesterday have made
themselves most active in this. I have cultivated patience,
and made no attempt at a retort."

And in the same tone, he ended. "Ambition has been
ascribed to me. God knows how sincerely I prayed from

The Great Debates

241

the first that this field of ambition might not be opened. I
claim no insensibility to political honors; but today could
the Missouri restriction be restored, and the whole slavery
question replaced on the old ground of toleration' by ne-
cessity where it exists, with unyielding hostility to the
spread of it, on principle, I would, in consideration, gladly
agree, that Judge Douglas should never be out, and I never
in, an office, so long as we both or either, live."

The speech may have been longer. What he wrote that /
survived took less than 15 minutes. Packed with momen-
tous meanings for people south and north, it was a sober
appeal in an hour of hair-trigger tension. The local report-
ers raved over "the outpouring," "the gaily decorated stores
and public buildings," "banners and flags flying," the
Springfield Journal printing six columns of labored descrip-
tion, stilted narrative in commonplace style. The speech
that would have taken a half column had this unconsciously
silly and blandly ignorant report in the Journal: "At two
o'clock, the vast multitude being congregated around the
stand, Mr. Lincoln began his speech. We have neither time
nor room to give even a sketch of his remarks to-day. Suf-
fice it to say, the speech was one of his very best efforts, dis-
distinguished for its clearness and force, and for the satis-
factory manner in which he exposed the . . . misrepresen-
tations of the enemy. The conclusion of this speech was
one of the most eloquent appeals ever addressed to the
American people. It was received with spontaneous bursts
of enthusiasm unequalled by any thing ever before enacted
in this city." And not a paragraph, not a line or phrase, of
the brief and great speech itself!

Henry Villard of the New York Staats-Zeitung wrote
that a thunderstorm had come up the night before Election
Day. Lincoln with Villard, at a flag station 20 miles west
of Springfield, crawled into a railroad boxcar. They sat on
the floor, chins on knees, talking in the dark. Villard felt
the laughs "peculiar" as Lincoln rambled on about him-
self for U.S. Senator. "I am convinced that I am good
enough for it; but, in spite of it all, I am saying to myself
every day: Tt is too big a thing for you; you will never get

242 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

it.' Mary [Mrs. Lincoln] insists, however, that I am going
to be Senator and President of the United States, too."

And there was light enough in the boxcar for Villard to
see Lincoln, with arms hugging knees, roaring another long
laugh, and shaking in legs and arms at his wife's ambition
for him to be President. The fun of it swept him as he shook
but the words, "Just think of such a sucker as me as Presi-
dent!"

November 2, Election Day, arrived, wet and raw in
northern Illinois. And though Lincoln had a majority of
4,085 votes over Douglas, Douglas because of a gerry-
mander held a majority of the legislature. Lincoln wrote
to loyal friends, "Another explosion will soon come." Doug-
las managed to be supported as the best instrument both
to break down and to uphold the slave power. "No in-
genuity can keep this deception ... up a great while."
He was glad he made the race. /Though I now sink out of
view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some
marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long
after I am gone." And he joked; he was like the boy who
stubbed his toe, "It hurt too bad to laugh, and he was too
big to cry."

On January 5 the legislature elected Douglas. After the
news Lincoln sat alone in his law office with his thoughts
a while, blew out the light, locked the door, stepped down
to the street, and started home. The path, worn pig-backed,
was slippery. One foot slipped and knocked the other foot
from under him. He was falling. He' made a quick twist,
caught himself, and said with a ripple, "It's a slip and not a
fall!" The streak of superstition in him was touched. He
said it again, "A slip and not a fall!"

And far off in Washington, Stephen A. Douglas was
reading a telegram, from the State Register, "Glory to God
and the Sucker Democracy, Douglas 54, Lincoln 46."

In November 1858 the Illinois Gazette at Lacon, the
Chicago Democrat, the Olney, Illinois, Times, nominated
Lincoln for President. The Cincinnati Gazette printed a
letter nominating him, and a mass meeting at Sandusky,
Ohio, called for him to head the Republican ticket in 1860.

The Great Debates

243

In Bloomington, in December, Jesse Fell saw Lincoln
coming out of the courthouse door. Fell was a land trader
in thousand-acre tracts, a railroad promoter, a contractor
for large lots of railroad ties off his timberland holdings.
He was of Quaker blood, antislavery, Republican, a little
below medium height, smooth-faced, honest-spoken, trusted
and liked in Bloomington. He stepped across the street and
asked Lincoln to go with him to the law office of his
brother, Kersey H. Fell. A calm twilight was deepening, as
Fell said: "Lincoln, I have been East, . . . travelling in all
the New England States, save Maine; in New York, New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana; and
everywhere I hear you talked about. Very frequently I
have been asked, *who is this man Lincoln, of your state?'
. . . Being, as you know, an ardent Republican, and your
friend, I usually told them, we had in Illinois, two giants in-
stead of one; that Douglas was the little one, as they all
knew, but mat you were the big one which they didn't all
know. But, seriously, Lincoln, Judge Douglas being so
widely known, you are getting a national reputation through
him . . . your speeches in whole or in part . . . have been
pretty extensively published in the East ... I have a de-
cided impression, that if your popular history and efforts
on the slavery question can be sufficiently brought before
the people, you can be made a formidable, if not a suc-
cessful, candidate for the Presidency."

Lincoln heard and, as Fell told it, replied: "Oh, Fell,
what's the use of talking of me for the Presidency, whilst
we have such men as Seward, Chase, and others, who are
... so intimately associated with the principles of the Re-
publican party. Everybody knows them. Nobody, scarcely,
outside of Illinois, knows me."

Then Fell analyzed. Yes, Seward and Chase stood out as
haying rendered larger service to the Republican cause
than Lincoln. "The truth is," said Fell, "they have rendered
too much service, . . . have both made long records . . .
and have said some very radical things, which, however
just and true . . . would seriously damage them ... if
nominated . . . What the Republican party wants, to in-
sure success in 1860, is a man of popular origin, of ac-

244 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

knowledged ability, committed against slavery aggressions,
who has no record to defend, and no radicalism of an of-
fensive character . . . You have sprung from the humble
walks of life . . . and if we can only get these facts suffi-
ciently before the people, depend upon it, there is some
chance for you."

And Fell went on, "Now, Mr. Lincoln, I come to the
business part of this interview. My native State, Pennsyl-
vania, will have a large number of votes to cast for some-
body . . . Pennsylvania don't like, overmuch, New York
and her politicians; she has a candidate, Cameron, of her
own, but he will not be acceptable to a larger number of
her own people, much less abroad, and will be dropped.
Through an eminent jurist and essayist of my native county
in Pennsylvania, favorably known throughout the state, I
want to get up a well-considered, well-written newspaper
article, telling the people who you are, and what you have
done, that it may be circulated not only in that state, but
elsewhere, and thus help in manufacturing sentiment in
your favor. I know your public life and can furnish items
that your modesty would forbid, but I don't know much
about your private history: when you were born, and
where, the names and origin of your parents, what you did
in early life, what were your opportunities for education,
etc., and I want you to give me these. Won't you do it?"

Lincoln had been listening and said: "Fell, I admit the
force of much that you say, and admit that I am ambitious,
and would like to be President; I am not insensible to the
compliment you pay me, and the interest you manifest in
the matter, but there is no such good luck in store for me,
as the Presidency of these United States; besides, there is
nothing in my early history that would interest you or any-
body else; and as Judge Davis says, It won't pay.' "

Rising, Lincoln wrapped a thick gray and brown wool
shawl around his bony shoulders, spoke good night, and
started down the stairway, with Fell calling out that Lin-
coln must listen and do as he asked. Newspapers in small
towns in Midwest states had begun asking, "Why not Abra-
ham Lincoln for President of the United States?" Calls for
Lincoln to speak, as the foremost Republican figure of the

Strange Friend: Friendly Stranger 245

West, were coming from Kansas, Buffalo, Des Moines,
Pittsburgh. Thurlow Weed, the New York boss, wired to
Illinois, "Send Abram Lincoln to Albany immediately."
Long John Wentworth, editor of the Chicago Democrat, a
Republican paper, saw Lincoln looming, and told him he
"needed somebody to run him"; in New York Seward had
Weed to run him. Lincoln laughed, "Only events can make
a President"

Chapter 12

Strange Friend and Friendly Stranger

Lincoln was 51 years old. With each year since he had be-
come a grown man, his name and ways, and stories about
him, had been spreading among plain people and their
children. So tall and so bony, with so peculiar a slouch and
so easy a saunter, so sad and so haunted-looking, so quizzi-
cal and comic, as if hiding a lantern that lighted and went
out and that he lighted again — he was the Strange Friend
and the Friendly Stranger. Like something out of a picture
book for children — he was. His form of slumping arches
and his face of gaunt sockets were a shape a Great Artist
had scrawled from careless clay.

He looked like an original plan for an extra-long horse
or a lean tawny buffalo, that a Changer had suddenly
whisked into a man-shape. Or he met the eye as a clumsy,
mystical giant that had walked out of a Chinese or Russian
fairy story, or a bogy who had stumbled out of an ancient
Saxon myth with a handkerchief full of presents he wanted
to divide among all the children in the world.

He didn't wear clothes. Rather, clothes hung upon him
as if on a rack to dry, or on a loose ladder up a windswept
chimney. His clothes, to keep the chill or the sun off,
seemed to whisper, "He put us on when he was thinking
about something else."

He dressed any which way at times, in broadcloth, a

246

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

silk hat, a silk choker, and a flaming red silk handkerchief,
so that one court clerk said Lincoln was "fashionably
dressed, as neatly attired as any lawyer at court, except
Ward Lamon." Or again, people said Lincoln looked like a
huge skeleton with skin over the bones, and clothes cov-
ering the skin.

The stovepipe hat he wore sort of whistled softly: "I am
not a hat at all; I am the little garret roof where he tucks
in little thoughts he writes on pieces of paper." The hat,
size seven and one-eighth, had a brim one and three-quar-
ters inches wide. The inside band in which the more impor-
tant letters and notes were tucked, measured two and
three-quarters inches. The cylinder of the stovepipe was
22 inches in circumference. The hat was lined with heavy
silk and, measured inside, exactly six inches deep. And
people tried to guess what was going on under that hat.
Written in pencil on the imitation satin paper that formed
part of the lining was the signature "A. Lincoln, Spring-
field, 111.," so that any forgetful person who might take the
hat by mistake would know where to bring it back. Also
the hatmaker, "George Hall, Springfield, 111.," had printed
his name in the hat so that Lincoln would know where to
get another one just like it.

The umbrella with the name "Abraham Lincoln" stitched
in, faded and drab from many rains and regular travels,
looked sleepy and murmuring. "Sometime we shall have
all the sleep we want; we shall turn the law office over to
the spiders and the cobwebs; and we shall quit politics for
keeps."

There could have been times when children and dream-
ers looked at Abraham Lincoln and lazily drew their eye-
lids half shut and let their hearts roam about him — and
they half -believed him to be a tall horse chestnut tree or a
rangy horse or a big wagon or a log barn full of new-mown
hay — something else or more than a man, a lawyer, a Re-
publican candidate with principles, a prominent citizen —
something spreading, elusive, and mysterious — the Strange
Friend and the Friendly Stranger.

In Springfield and other places, something out of the
ordinary seemed to connect with Abraham Lincoln's past,

Strange Friend: Friendly Stranger 247

his birth, a mystery of where he came from. The wedding
certificate of his father and mother was not known to be
on record. Whispers floated of his origin as "low-flung,"
of circumstances so misty and strange that political friends
wished they could be cleared up and made respectable. The
wedding license of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks had
been moved to a new county courthouse — where no one
had thought to search.

The year of the big debates a boy had called out, "There
goes old Mr. Lincoln," and Lincoln hearing it, remarked
to a friend, 'They commenced it when I was scarcely thirty
years old." Often when people called him "Old Abe" they
meant he had the texture and quaint friendliness of old
handmade Bibles, old calfskin law books, weather-beaten
oak and walnut planks, or wagon axles always willing in
storm or stars.

A neighbor boy, Fred Dubois, joined with a gang who
tied a string to knock off Lincoln's hat. "Letters and papers
fell out of the hat and scattered over the sidewalk," said
Dubois. "He stooped to pick them up and us boys climbed
all over him." As a young man he played marbles with
boys; as an older man he spun tops with his own boys, Tad
and Willie.

When William Plato of Kane County came to his office
with the little girl, Ella, he stood Ella on a chair and told
her, "And you're not as tall as I am, even now." A girl
skipping along a sidewalk stumbled on a brick and fell back-
ward, just as Lincoln came along. He caught her, lifted
her up in his arms, put her gently down and asked, "What
is your name?" "Mary Tuft." "Well, Mary, when you reach
home tell your mother you have rested in Abraham's
bosom."

Old Aesop could not have invented a better fable than
the one about the snakes in the bed, to show the harm of
letting slavery into the new territories. "If there was a bed
newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and
it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put
them there with them, I take it no man would say there was
any question how I ought to decide."

When Tad was late bringing home the milk he hunted

248

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

the boy and came home with Tad on his shoulders and
carrying the milk pail himself. Once he chased Tad and
brought the little one home, holding him at arm's length;
the father chuckled at his son's struggle to kick him in
the face. Once as he lugged the howling Willie and Tad, a
neighbor asked, "Why, Mr. Lincoln, what's the matter?"
The answer: "Just what's the matter with the whole world.
I've got three walnuts and each wants two."

In Rushville and towns circling around, they remembered
the day he was there. The whole town turned out, among
them young women of Rushville society, as such. One of
the belles dangled a little Negro doll baby in Lincoln's
face. He looked into her face and asked quietly, "Madam,
are you the mother of that?" At many a corn shucking and
Saturday night shindig, this incident had been told.

Germans and Irishmen had greetings from him. "I know
enough German to know that Kaufman means merchant,
and Schneider means tailor — am I not a good German
scholar?" Or, "That reminds me of what the Irishman
said, Tn this country one man is as good as another; and
for the matter of that, very often a great deal better.' "

He told of the long-legged boy "sparking" a farmer's
daughter when the hostile father came in with a shotgun;
the boy jumped through a window, and running across the
cabbage patch scared up a rabbit; in about two leaps the
boy caught up with the rabbit, kicked it high in the air,
and grunted, "Git out of the road and let somebody run
that knows how." He told of a Kentucky horse sale where
a small boy was riding a fine horse to show off points. A
man whispered, "Look here, boy, hain't that horse got the
splints?" and the boy, "Mister, I don't know what the
splints is, but if it's good for him, he has got it; if it ain't
good for him, he ain't got it."

Riding to Lewistown, an old acquaintance, a weather-
beaten farmer, spoke of going to law with his next neighbor.
"Been a neighbor of yours for long?" "Nigh onto fifteen
year." "Part of the time you get along all right, don't you?"
"I reckon we do." "Well, see this horse of mine? I some-
times get out of patience with him. But I know his faults;
he does fairly well as horses go; it might take me a long

Strange Friend: Friendly Stranger 249

time to get used to some other horse's faults; for all horses
have faults."

Lincoln told of a balloonist going up in New Orleans,
sailing for hours, and dropping his parachute over a cot-
ton field. The gang of Negroes picking cotton saw a man
coming down from the sky in blue silk, in silver spangles,
wearing golden slippers. They ran — all but one old-timer
who had rheumatism and couldn't get away. He waited
till the balloonist hit the ground and walked toward him.
Then he mumbled: "Howdy, Massa Jesus. How's yo' Pa?"

He liked to tell of the strict judge of whom it was said:
"He would hang a man for blowing his nose in the street,
but he would quash the indictment if it failed to specify
which hand he blew it with."

He could write an angry letter, with hard names and
hot epithets — and then throw it in the stove. He advised it
was a help sometimes to write a hot letter and then burn
it. On being told of a certain man saying, "I can't under-
stand those speeches of Lincoln," he laughed, "There are
always some fleas a dog can't reach."

Though the years had passed, he still believed, "Improve-
ment in condition — is the order of things in a society of
equals." And he still struggled under the load of that co-
nundrum of history he had written ten years back: "As
Labor is the common burthen of our race, so the effort of
some to shift their share of the burthen on to the shoulders
of others, is the great, durable, curse of the race."

He defended Peachy Harrison who killed Greek Grafton,
a law student in the office of Lincoln & Herndon. On the
witness stand came old Peter Cartwright, the famous cir-
cuit rider, grandfather of the accused murderer. "How
long have you known the prisoner?" "I have known him
since a babe; he laughed and cried on my knee." And Lin-
coln led on with more questions, till old Peter Cartwright
was telling the last words that slowly choked out from the
murdered man, three days after the stabbing: "I am dying;
I will soon part with all I love on earth and I want you to
say to my slayer that I forgive him. I want to leave this
earth with a forgiveness of all who have in any way injured
me." Lincoln had then begged the jury to be as forgiving

250 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

as the murdered man. The handling of the grandfather as
a witness cleared Peachy Harrison and set him free.

Over a period of some 20 years Lincoln had signed 20
petitions for pardons for convicted rnen, the governors of
Illinois granting pardons in 14 cases. He had served as at-
torney for 14 of the convicted men and in some cases wrote
his opinions and beliefs why the men should be set free. He
wrote as to one of his clients that he was of a young fam-
ily, had lost one arm, and had served five-sixths of his
sentence, of another that it was "a miscarriage of justice,"
of two brothers sentenced to one year for stealing five
shoats valued at $10 that the public was "greatly stirred"
in their favor.

The name of the man had come to stand for what he
was, plus beliefs, conjectures and guesses. He was spoken
of as a "politician" in the sense that politics is a trade of
cunning, ambitious, devious men. He chose a few issues
on which to explain his mind fully. Some of his reticences
were not evasions but retirements to cloisters of silence.
Questions of life and destiny shook him close to prayers
and tears in his own hidden corners and byways; the depths
of the issues were too dark, too pitiless, inexorable, for a
man to open his mouth and try tq tell what he knew.

In the cave of winds in which he saw history in the
making he was far more a listener than a talker. The high
adventure of great poets, inventors, explorers, facing the
unknown and the unknowable, was in his face and breath,
and had come to be known, to a few, for the danger and
bronze of it.

There was a word: democracy. Tongues of politics
played with it. Lincoln had his slant at it. "As I would not
be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my
idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the ex-
tent of the difference, is no democracy."

He had faced men who had yelled, "I'll fight any man
that's goin' to vote for that miserable skunk, Abe Lincoln."
And he knew homes where solemn men declared, "I've
seen Abe Lincoln when he played mournin' tunes on their
heartstrings till they mourned with the mourners." He was
taken, in some log cabins, as a helper of men. "When I

Strange Friend: Friendly Stranger 251

went over to hear him at Alton," said one, "things looked
onsartin. 'Peared like I had more'n I could stand up under.
But he hadn't spoken more'n ten minutes afore I felt like
I never had no load. I begin to feel ashamed o' bein' weary
en complainin'."

He loved trees, was kin somehow to trees, his favorite
the hard maple. Pine, cedar, spruce, cypress, had each their
pine family ways for him. He could pick crossbreeds of
trees that plainly belonged to no special family. He had
found trees and men alike; on the face of them, the out-
side, they didn't tell their character. Life, wind, rain, light-
ning, events, told the fiber, what was clean or rotten.

What he said to a crowd at Lewistown one August after-
noon of 1858 had been widely printed and many a reader
found it deeply worth reading again and again. His theme
was the Declaration of Independence and its phrase, "that
all men are created equal," and have unalienable rights to
'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." That document
was a "majestic" interpretation:

This was their lofty, and wise, and noble under-
standing of the justice of the Creator to His crea-
tures. [Applause.] Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures,
to the whole great family of man ... They grasped
not only the whole race of man then living, but they
reached forward and seized upon the farthest pos-
terity . . . Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the
tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they es-
tablished these great self-evident truths, that when in
the distant future some man, some faction, some inter-
est, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men,
or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look
up again to the Declaration of Independence and take
courage to renew the battle which their fathers began
... I charge you to drop every paltry and insignifi-
cant thought for any man's success. It is nothing; I
am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not
destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity — the Dec-
laration of American Independence.

252

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Once in 1858 Lincoln wrote a meditation he didn't use
in any of the debates. It was a private affair between him
and his conscience:

. . . Yet I have never failed — do not now fail — to
remember that in the republican cause there is a
higher aim than that of mere office. I have not allowed
myself to forget that the abolition of the Slave-trade
by Great Brittain was agitated a hundred years before
it was a final success; that the measure had it's open
fire-eating opponents; it's stealthy "dont-care" oppo-
nents; it's dollar and cent opponents; it's inferior race
opponents; its negro equality opponents; and its re-
ligion and good order opponents; that all these oppo-
nents got offices, and their adversaries got none. But I
have also remembered that though they blazed, like
tallow-candles for a century, at last they flickered in
the socket, died out, stank in the dark for a brief sea-
son, and were remembered no more, even by the
smell ... I am proud, in my passing speck of time,
to contribute an humble mite to that glorious consum-
mation, which my own poor eyes may not last to see.

And that year he read at Bloomington a lecture on "Dis-
coveries and Inventions," repeating it later in Springfield.
Scheduled a second time at Bloomington he met so small
an audience that he didn't bother to read his paper; he
soon dropped the idea of being a "popular lecturer." What
he read revealed him as a droll and whimsical humorist,
a scholar and thinker, a keen observer and a man of con-
templation who, if fate ordained, could have a rich and
quiet life entirely free from political ambitions. He touched
on man's first discovery or invention of clothes, of speech,
of wind power for sailing, of the alphabet, of printing.
Rulers and laws in time past had made it a crime to read
or to own books. "It is difficult for us, now and here, to
conceive how strong .this slavery of the mind was; and how
long it did, of necessity, take, to break it's shackles, and
to get a habit of freedom of thought, established." A new
country, such as America, "is most favorable — almost

Strange Friend: Friendly Stranger 253

necessary — to the immancipation of thought, and the con-
sequent advancement of civilization and the arts." Briefly
and ironically, in passing, he went political, mentioning "the
invention of negroes, or, of the present mode of using
them, in 1434." Dominant in the paper he read was love
of books, of pure science, of knowledge for its own sake, of
a humanity creeping out of dark mist toward clear light.

Somewhere in this period Milton Hay of Springfield
heard Lincoln speak offhand a rule or maxim in politics.
Hay later passed it on to Joseph Fifer of Bloomington
who found it so simple and so nicely singsong that he
couldn't forget it: "You can fool some of the people all of
the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you
can't fool all of the people all of the time."

At a remark in Mayor Sanderson's house in Galesburg
that he was "afraid of women," Lincoln laughed, "A
woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know can't
hurt me." He told Whitney he hated going through the act
of telling a hayrack full of girls in white gowns, each girl
one state of the Union, "I also thank you for this beautiful
basket of flowers." After a tea party at the home of Mayor
Boyden of Urbana, the mayor and Whitney excused them-
selves for an hour, and left Lincoln alone with Mrs. Boy-
den, Mrs. Whitney, and her mother. Whitney, on return-
ing, found Lincoln "ill at ease as a bashful country boy,"
eyes shifting from floor to ceiling and back, arms behind
and then in front, then tangled as though he tried to hide
them, and his long legs tying and untying themselves. Whit-
ey couldn't understand it unless it was because he was
alone in a room with three women.

A woman wrote her admiration of his course in politics,
and he thanked her in a letter. "I have never corresponded
much with ladies; and hence I postpone writing letters to
them, as a business which I do not understand." Men knew
of his saying, after giving money or time or a favor in an-
swer to a pathetic but probably bogus appeal, "I thank God
I wasn't born a woman."

Herndon believed Lincoln cloaked his ways with women
by a rare and fine code, writing, "Mr. Lincoln had a strong,

254

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

if not terrible passion for women. He could hardly keep
his hands off a woman, and yet, much to his credit, he lived
a pure and virtuous life. His idea was that a woman had as
much right to violate the marriage vow as the man — no
more and no less. His sense of right — his sense of justice
— his honor forbade his violating his marriage vow. Judge
Davis said to me, 'Mr. Lincoln's honor saved many a
woman.' This I know. I have seen Lincoln tempted and I
have seen him reject the approach of woman!"

A woman charged with keeping a house of ill fame was
a client of Lincoln & Herndon; they asked for a change
of venue; and Lincoln drove across the prairies from one
town to another with the madam of the house and her
girls. After the trial the madam was asked about Lincoln's
talk with her. Yes, he told stories, and they were nearly
all funny. Yes, but were the stories proper or improper, so
to speak? Well — the madam hesitated — they were funny;
she and all the girls laughed— but coming to think it over
she believed the stories could have been told "with safety
in the presence of ladies anywhere." Then she added, as
though it ought to be told, "But that is more than I can
say for Bill Herndon."

A curious friend and chum of Lincoln was Ward Hill
Lamon, his Danville law partner, a young Virginian, daunt-
less, bull-necked, melodious, tall, commanding, often racy
and smutty in talk, aristocratic and, drinking men said,
magnificent in the amount of whisky he could carry. The
first time he and Lincoln met, Lamon wore a swallow-tailed
coat, white neckcloth, and ruffled silk shirt, and Lincoln:
"Going to try your hand at law, are you? I don't think you
would succeed at splitting rails." As the years passed a
strange bond of loyalty between the two men grew. "Sing
me a little song," was Lincoln's word to Lamon, who
brought out a banjo and struck up "Cousin Sally Downard,"
or "O Susanna," or the sad "Twenty Years Ago."

Women, music, poetry, art, pure science, all required
more time than Lincoln had to give them. He liked to tell of
the Indiana boy blurting out, "Abe, I don't s'pose there's
anybody on earth likes gingerbread better'n I do — and gets
less'n I do."

Strange Friend: Friendly Stranger 255

Herndon told of his partner coming to the office some-
times at seven in the morning when his usual hour to ar-
rive was nine. Or of Lincoln at noon, having brought to
the office a package of crackers and cheese, sitting alone
eating. Mrs. Lincoln and Herndon hated each other. While
Herndon was careless as to where he spat, she was not
merely scrupulously neat and immaculate as to linen and
baths, she was among the most ambitious women in Spring-
field in the matter of style and fashion. She knew of such
affairs as Herndon getting drunk with two other men and
breaking a windowpane that her husband had to hustle the
money for so that the sheriff wouldn't lock up his law
partner. She didn't like it that her husband had a drinking
partner reckless with money, occasionally touching Lin-
coln for loans. She carried suspicions and nursed misgiv-
ings as to this swaggering upstart, radical in politics, tran-
scendentalist in philosophy, antichurch.

At parties, balls, social gatherings, she moved, vital,
sparkling, often needlessly insinuating or directly and
swiftly insolent. If the music was bad, what was the need
of her making unkind remarks about the orchestra? Chills,
headaches, creepers of fear came; misunderstandings rose
in waves so often around her; she was alone, so all alone,
so like a child thrust into the Wrong Room.

At parties, balls, social gatherings, she trod the mazy
waltzes in crinoline gowns, the curves of the hoop skirts
shading down the plump curves of her figure. Once when
talk turned to Lincoln and Douglas, she had said, "Mr.
Lincoln may not be as handsome a figure, but people are
perhaps not aware that his heart is as large as his arms
are long."

She wrote to a sister in September 1857 of a trip east
with her husband when he had law business in New York.
A moment of happy dreaminess ran through part of her let-
ter. "The summer has so strangely and rapidly passed away.
Some portion of it was spent most pleasantly in traveling
East. We visited Niagara, Canada, New York and other
points of interest." \

How often good times shone for them, only they two
could tell. They were intense individuals, he having come

256 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

through hypochondria, and she moving by swirls toward a
day when she would cry out that hammers were knocking
nails into her head, that hot wires were being drawn
through her eyes. Between flare-ups and regrets, his was
most often the spirit of accommodation. He was ten years
older than she, with a talent for conciliation and adjust-
ment.

There were times when she made herself pretty for him.
One picture of her after 15 years of marriage shows dark
ringlets of hair down her temples and about her ears, a lit-
tle necklace circling her bare neck, three roses at her bosom,
and a lily in her shapely hands.

Lincoln in 1857 sent an editor, John E. Rosette, a letter
marked "Private": j

Your note about the little paragraph in the Repub-
lican was received yesterday, since which time I have
been too unwell to notice it. I had not supposed you
wrote or approved it. The whole originated in mistake.
You know by the conversation with me that I thought
the establishment of the paper unfortunate, but I al-
ways expected to throw no obstacle in its way, and to
patronize it to the extent of taking it and paying for
one copy. When the paper was brought to my house,
my wife said to me, "Now are you going to take an-
other worthless little paper?" I said to her evasively, "I
have not directed the paper to be left." From this, in
my absence, she sent the message to the carrier. This is
the whole story.

A lawyer was talking business to Lincoln once at home
and suddenly the door opened. Mrs. Lincoln put her head
in and snapped the question whether he had done an er-
rand she told him to do. He looked up quietly, said he had
been busy, but would attend to it as soon as he could. The
woman wailed; she was neglected, abused, insulted. The
door slammed; she was ' gone. The visiting lawyer, open-
eyed, muttered his surprise. Lincoln laughed, "Why, if you
knew how much good that little eruption did, what a re-
lief it was to her, and if you knew her as well as I do, you

Strange Friend: Friendly Stranger 257

would be glad she had had an opportunity to explode."

She was often anxious about her boys, had mistaken
fears about their safety or health, exaggerated evils that
might befall them. She gave parties for them and wrote
with her own pen, in a smooth and even script, gracious
invitations.

Mary Todd had married a genius who made demands;
when he wanted to work, it was no time for interruptions
or errands. For this brooding and often somber man she

Drawn by Otto J. Schneider from Lincoln's hat and
umbrella in Chicago Historical Society

was wife, housekeeper, and counselor in personal and po-
litical affairs in so far as he permitted. She watched his
"browsing" in the pantry and tried to bring him to regular
meals. She had kept house years ago, too poor for a hired
girl; they burned wood then; now they had a coal cook-
stove with four lids and a reservoir to warm rain water.
She had chosen the beautiful, strong black-walnut cradle,
into which she had put, one after the other, four boy
babies.

She knew of the money cost in 1858 when he dropped
nearly all law cases for months and paid his way at hotels
and in 4,200 miles of travel, writing in one letter after the
campaign closed, "I am absolutely without money now for
even household purposes." At times he did the shopping,
Herndon saying that of a winter's morning he might be
seen around the market house, a basket on his arm, "his
old gray shawl wrapped around his neck."

258

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

With their rising income and his taking place as the out-
standing leader of his party, Mary Lincoln in the late 1850's
enjoyed giving parties occasionally for two or three hundred
people. Isaac N. Arnold noted of these evenings "every-
thing orderly and refined," and "every guest perfectly at
ease," with a table "famed for the excellence of many rare
Kentucky dishes, and in season, loaded with venison, wild
turkeys, prairie chickens, quail and other game." She had
moved with him from lean years to the comforts of the
well-to-do middle class. With ownership of his house and
lot, with farm lands, and collectible bills he had out, Lin-
coln in 1859 had property worth perhaps $15,000 or more.

Chapter 13

'Only Events Can Make a President"

Joseph W. Fifer, later a governor of Illinois, a man of un-
usually accurate and tenacious memory, heard Lincoln
speak in 1858 to an immense crowd in Bloomington. He
stood ten feet from where Lincoln was speaking, turned
around for a look, "And the faces of those listening thou-
sands were as if carved out of rock on a mountainside —
so still, so set!" The voice they heard was "metallic, clear,
ringing, very penetrating." Fifer heard the voice at one
point regarding the Negro, "In the right to eat the bread
his own hands have earned he is the equal of Judge Doug-
las, or of myself, or of any living man." Then Lincoln
"raised high his long right arm with the clenched hand
on the end of it — high above his head — and he shook it in
the air and then brought it down. And when he did that it
— it made the hair on a man's head stand up, and the
breath stop in his throat."

Lincoln's name had spread far as a speaker and thinker.

"Only Events Can Make a President" 259

In 1859 he made speaking trips in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio,
Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and had to refuse many invita-
tions to speak. On these trips he met leading men of the Re-
publican party. They could judge whether he was presi-
dential timber. He had said, "Only events can make a
president," and there were friends saying events might dic-
tate that each other candidate was either too old, too radi-
cal or too conservative and that Lincoln was on points the
one most available. Also on these speaking trips Lincoln
kept in touch with undercurrents of politics and public
feeling; he met men who were to be delegates to the na-
tional Republican party convention the next year.

At no time in his many addresses of this year did he hint
that he might be a candidate for President the next year
and when good Republican party men said something
about Lincoln for President he brushed it off with remarks
that he wasn't fit or, as he had told Fell, there were greater
men than he the party could choose. Yet his speeches in
Ohio had a simple finality, a merciless logic, often a so-
lemnity woven with Bible verses. He tore to ribbons the
pretenses of Douglas, Buchanan, Chief Justice Taney; his
lamentations over the possible outspreading of slavery had
a dark music. There were listeners who couldn't help think-
ing and feeling he stood before them a consecrated man
with a warm heart, a cool head, and he might make an
able President.

He tried to guide party policy, writing in June 1859 to
Governor Chase about the Ohio Republican party platform
demand for the "repeal of the atrocious Fugitive Slave
Law." The proposition was "already damaging us here" in
Illinois. If brought up in the next Republican national con-
vention it would "explode" the convention and the party.

In May 1859 banker Jacob Bunn handling the deal, Lin-
coln bought for $400 the weekly German-language news-
paper of Springfield, the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger. By the
contract, Lincoln owned the type, press and other equip-
ment, and Theodore Canisius, the editor, was to continue
publishing a Republican paper in German with occasional
articles in English. Those handling the deal kept it a se-
cret; Lincoln said nothing of it to Herndon; no news of it

260 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

was published. Editor Canisius had written Lincoln asking
where he stood on the Massachusetts Act of 1859 provid-
ing that no foreign-born naturalized citizen could hold of-
fice or vote until two years after his naturalization. Lincoln
wrote, "I am against it's adoption in Illinois, or in any
other place, where I have a right to oppose it." Having "no-
toriety" for his efforts in behalf of the Negro, he would
be "strangely inconsistent" if he favored "any project for
curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though
born in different lands, and speaking different languages
from myself." Canisius published this letter and it was
widely copied in other papers.

The census of the next year would show 1,300,000 for-
eigners in the country, 700,000 of them Germans, chiefly
in the Northern States. They held a balance of political
power in many states. Their editors and political leaders
were many of them German university graduates who had
taken a hand in the revolutions of 1830 or 1848 in Ger>
many; some had served prison terms or escaped; they had
been hunted men, coming to America as refugees and fugi-
tives; they had their bitterness over the Fugitive Slave Law.
One of the hunted was Lincoln's friend at Belleville, Gus-
tave Koerner, who to escape arrest, fled Germany to France,
then to St. Louis, later to become a Supreme Court justice
in Illinois and lieutenant governor. Lincoln was now
openly allying himself with these men. He had helped Ger-
mans write a resolution passed by the Republican state con-
vention in 1856 declaring that "our naturalization laws . . .
being just in principle, we are opposed to any change being
made in them intended to enlarge the time now required
to secure the rights of citizenship." This resolution a Ger-
man editor had taken to the Philadelphia national conven-
tion of the Republican party where it was, in substance,
adopted.

In September at Columbus, Ohio, Lincoln held the
spread of slavery to be the only thing that ever had threat-
ened the Union. Amid his sober reasonings and solemn ap-
peals there was laughter at his saying of Douglas, "His
explanations explanatory of explanations explained are in-

"Only Events Can Make a President*' 261

terminable" and again of Douglas' logic, "It is as impu-
dent and absurd as if a prosecuting attorney should stand
up before a jury, and ask them to convict A as the mur-
derer of B, while B was walking alive before them."

Next day in Cincinnati, he declared: "We must prevent
the outspreading of the institution . . . We must prevent
the revival of the African slave trade and the enacting by
Congress of a territorial slave code." To Kentuckians par-
ticularly, he wished to say: "We mean to remember that
you are as good as we; that there is no difference between
us other than the difference of circumstances. We mean to
recognise and bear in mind always that you have as good
hearts in your bosoms as other people, or as we claim to
have, and treat you accordingly. We mean to marry your
girls when we have a chance — the white ones I mean — and
I have the honor to inform you that I once did have a
chance in that way*"

On the morning of September 30, 1859, at the Wisconsin
State Fair in Milwaukee, Lincoln spoke as philosopher
and scientist, even as a sort of inventor. "I have thought a
good deal, in an abstract way, about a Steam Plow." In
the four years past the ground planted with corn in Illi-
nois had produced about 20 bushels to the acre. "The soil
has never been pushed up to one-half of its capacity." He
recommended "deeper plowing, analysis of soils, experi-
ments with manures, and varieties of seeds, observance of
seasons."

He saw the country as new and young; the hired laborer
could get a farm for himself. 'There is no such thing as a
freeman being fatally fixed tor life, in the condition of a
hired laborer." Some reasons held: "Labor is prior to, and
independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of
labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first
existed, — that labor can exist without capital, but that capi-
tal could never have existed without labor. Hence . . . labor
is the superior— greatly the superior — of capital."

Was the working class to be the mudsills on which the
structure of the upper class rested? "According to that
theory," Lincoln told his farmers, "a blind horse upon a

262

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should
be — all the better for being blind, that he could not tread
out of place, or kick understandingly." By that theory edu-
cation for the workers was regarded as dangerous. "A Yan-
kee who could invent a strong handed man without a head
would receive the everlasting gratitude of the 'mudsill' ad-
vocates." He spoke in simple words: "As each man has one
mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands to furnish food,
it was probably intended that that particular pair of hands
should feed that particular mouth — that each head is the
natural guardian, director, and protector of the hands and
mouth inseparably connected with it; and that being so,
every head should be cultivated, and improved, by what-
ever will add to its capacity for performing its charge. In
one word Free Labor insists on universal education."

He walked around seeing the prize bulls and stallions,
the blue-ribbon hens and roosters, and, chaffing with a
bunch of farmers, patted a boy on the head: "My little
man, I hope you live to vote the Republican ticket." The
boy's father broke in, "If he ever does, I'll break his neck."
And where a short strong man was lifting heavy weights,
Lincoln tried his muscles at lifting, looking down at the
short strong man and said, "Why, I could lick salt off the
top of your head." In the evening at the Newhall House he
made an offhand political speech and the next afternoon
spoke in Beloit and in the evening at Janesville.

The editor of the Wisconsin Pinery at Stevens Point
wrote: "He looks as if he was made for wading in deep
water. He looks like an open-hearted, honest man who has
grown sharp in fighting knaves. His face is swarthy and
filled with very deep long thought-wrinkles. His voice is
not heavy, but has a clear trumpet tone that can be heard
an immense distance."

Herndon brought from Boston a book that Lincoln read,
The Impending Crisis of the South, by Hinton Rowan
Helper, who came from a slaveholding family that had
lived a hundred years in the Carolinas. Helper gave formi-
dable statistics showing that under the free labor system

"Only Events Can Make a President" 263

the North was growing richer and the people of the South
sinking deeper in debt and poverty. Of the 6,184,477 people
in the Slave States in 1850 only 347,525 were slaveholders.
"As a general rule, poor white persons are regarded with
less esteem and attention than Negroes and though the con-
dition of the latter is wretched beyond description, vast
numbers of the former are infinitely worse off." The South
was shocked and aghast at the book, forbade its sale, and
its men in Congress lashed out at any and all who read it
or quoted from it.

Edwin A. Pollard of Virginia in his book Black Dia-
monds called for the African slave trade to be made lawful;
then Negroes fresh from the jungles could be sold in South-
ern seaports at $100 to $150 a head. 'The poor man might
then hope to own a negro." Senator James H. Hammond,
son of a Connecticut Yankee who had emigrated to South
Carolina, told the North: "Our slaves are hired for life
and well compensated. Yours are hired by the day, not
cared for, and scantily compensated . . . Why, you meet
more beggars in one day in the city of New York than you
would meet in a lifetime in the whole South . . . Your
slaves are white, of your own race. Our slaves do not vote.
Yours do vote ... If they knew that the ballot box is
stronger than an army of bayonets, and could combine,
where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed,
your government overthrown, your property divided."

Abolitionists had stood up and interrupted church serv-
ices to cry out it was a crime that the U.S. Constitution
sanctioned slavery. Garrison had publicly burned a copy of
the Constitution of the United States, calling it "a cove-
nant with hell"; Henry Ward Beecher had held mock auc-
tions of Negro women in his Brooklyn church; Uncle Tom's
Cabin had sold in many editions and as a stage play held
audiences breathless. The next census was to show that the
3,204,000 slaves of 1850 had increased to 3,953,500.

Out of Kansas came a man who ran slaves to freedom,
burned barns, stole horses, and murdered men and boys
without trial or hearing. He had come to Kansas from
Ohio and New York, a descendant of Mayflower Pilgrim
Fathers; two of his grandfathers fought in the Revolution-

264

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

ary War; at his house his 19 children partook in prayer
and Scripture reading morning and night. He told eastern
abolitionists action was the need, bold deeds. He had a
saying: "One man and God can overturn the universe."
Funds for rifles, pikes, wagons and stores were raised by
wealthy and respectable citizens who in secret code termed
the affair a "speculation in wool."

On Monday, October 17, 1859, the telegraph carried
strange news. At the junction of the Shenandoah and
Potomac Rivers, where Virginia and Maryland touch bor-
ders, in the rocky little town of Harpers Ferry, a U.S. Gov-
ernment arsenal and arms factory had been captured, the
gates broken and watchmen made prisoners, slaveholders
taken prisoner and their slaves told to spread the word of
freedom to slaves everywhere — all of this between Sunday
night and Monday daybreak.

Would the next news tell of slaves in revolt repeating the
Nat Turner insurrection, with men, women and children
butchered, homes looted and burned? The eountry breathed
easier on Tuesday's news that Colonel Robert E. Lee, com-
manding 80 marines, had rushed a little engine-house fort
where 18 men inside had fought till all were dead or
wounded except two.

In a corner of the engine house, an old man with a flow-
ing long beard said his name was John Brown. "Who sent
you here?" they asked. "No man sent me here. It was my
own prompting and that of my Maker." "What was your
object?" "I came to free the slaves. I think it right to inter-
fere with you to free those you hold in bondage." "And you
say you believe in the Bible?" "Certainly I do." "Don't you
know you are a seditionist, a traitor?" "I was trying to free
the slaves." "You are mad and fanatical." "And I think
you people of the South are mad and fanatical. Is it sane
to think such a system can last? Is it sane to talk of war
rather than give it up?"

The State of Virginia gave him a fair trial on charges
of murder, treason and inciting slaves to rebellion; North-
ern friends sent him able lawyers; he was found guilty and
sentenced to be hanged. He spoke calmly to the court. "Had
I taken up arms in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the in-

"Only Events Can Make a President" 265

telligent ... or any of their class, every man in this court
would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than
of punishment ... I see a book kissed here which is the
Bible, and which teaches me that all things that I would
have men do unto me, so must I do unto them. I endeav-
ored to act up to that instruction. I fought for the poor;
and I say it was right, for they are as good as any of you
. . . God is no respecter of persons . . . Now, if it be
deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the fur-
therance of the ends of justice ... I say, let it be done."

Friends planned to steal him away from the death watch.
He sent them word he would be more useful to freedom
when dead. He wished to be a memory among young men.
He was 59, but the average age of those who fought and
died for his cause was a little over 25. He wrote in the
Charles Town jail a last message before going to the gal-
lows: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes
of this guilty land will never be purged away but with
blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that
without much bloodshed it might be done." Beyond the
3,000 guardsmen with rifles and bayonets, he could see blue
haze and a shining sun over the Blue Ridge Mountains.
'This is a beautiful country; I never had the pleasure of
really seeing it before."

He had written to the young abolitionist, Frank B. San-
born, that he had always been "delighted with the doctrine
that all men are created equal" and "the Savior's com-
mand, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,'" then
adding, "Rather than have the doctrine fail in the world or
in these States, it would be better that a whole generation,
men, women and children, should die a violent death." His
mother and grandmother had died insane and a maternal
aunt and three maternal uncles suffered from the same
dread taint of blood. His mind, somewhat off balance, dwelt
on wholesale killings and with no haunting regrets over
murders by his hand and direction in Kansas. He believed
in his own right to doom others, and the power of God to
doom wrongdoers everlastingly. "All our actions, even all
the follies that led to this disaster, were decreed to happen
ages before the world was made." He was only walking as

266

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

God had ages ago foreordained. The sheriff asked, "Shall I
give you the signal when the trap is to be sprung?" "No,
no," came the even voice from the white beard. "Just get
it over quickly."

John Brown's ghost did walk. The governor of Virginia,
the jailer, spoke of how he died, without a quaver, cool,
serene. Emerson, Thoreau, Victor Hugo compared him to
Christ, to Socrates, to the great martyrs. Wendell Phillips
said, "The lesson of the hour is insurrection." Abolitionists
acclaimed him and spoke for disunion. The antislavery men
had regrets; they knew the South was lashed and would
retaliate. Senator Douglas called for a law to punish con-
spiracies, quoting Lincoln's House Divided and Seward's
Irrepressible Conflict speeches to indicate that Republican
politicians and their "revolutionary doctrines" had incited
John Brown.

John Brown became a mystical and haunting challenge.
Five of his moral and financial supporters crossed the Ca-
nadian border to be safe from investigation. His chief
backer, Gerrit Smith, a quaint and lovable character who
had expected a different performance from Brown, broke
down in fear of indictment and misunderstanding; under
"a troop of hallucinations," he was taken to the Utica,
New York, Asylum for the Insane, where in six weeks he
was restored to calm.

The New York Herald published, in full, Seward's Senate
speech foretelling "the irrepressible conflict." Seward now
said he was opposed to conspiracy, ambush, invasion and
force as shown by Brown; he favored reason, suffrage and
the spirit of the Christian religion. Yet his explanations
could not wash away the radical stripes. Political observers
commented that Seward's prestige as a candidate for Pres-
ident had been hard hit. Jesse Fell and Judge David Davis
worked steadily on their plans to nominate their dark horse
the coming May.

Lincoln in Elwood, Kansas, referred to the hanging of
Brown, and speaking in the dining room of the Great West-
ern Hotel, the Elwood Free Press reported, "He believed the
attack of Brown wrong for two reasons. It was a violation
of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far

"Only Events Can Make a President" 267
as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil
. . . John Brown has shown great courage, rare unselfish-
ness, as even Gov. Wise testifies. But no man, North or
South, can approve of violence or crime."

Of the fierce issue shaking the country he said, "The
Slaves constitute one seventh of our entire population.
Wherever there, is an element of this magnitude in a gov-
ernment it will be talked about." Kansas now had a consti-
tution, a legislature, and was soon to ballot on territorial
officers and a delegate to Congress. Lincoln spoke for the
Republican ticket in Troy, Doniphan, Atchison, and at
Leavenworth the Times reported: "In Brown's hatred of
slavery the speaker sympathized with him. But Brown's in-
surrectionary attempt he emphatically denounced. He be-
lieved the old man insane, and had yet to find the first Re-
publican who endorsed the proposed insurrection." He
warned the Southern element, according to the Leaven-
worth Register, "If constitutionally we elect a President,
and therefore you undertake to destroy the Union, it will
be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been
dealt with."

He rode in an open one-horse buggy on 20- and 30-mile
drives over frozen roads across treeless prairie, the scattered
sod houses of pioneers looking lonesome. Once on open
prairie he met Henry Villard, traveling eastward from Col-
orado. They chatted a few minutes and Villard noticed Lin-
coln shivering, a raw northwest wind cutting through where
the short overcoat left the legs poorly covered. Lincoln
was glad to accept Villard's offer of a buffalo robe.

Keeping company with Lincoln over his Kansas trip, and
having Lincoln as house guest in Leavenworth, was Mark
W. Delahay, who had known Lincoln in Illinois and whose
wife was distantly related to Lincoln's stepmother, Sarah
Bush Lincoln. Delahay, eight years younger than Lincoln,
was born in Maryland, had gone to Illinois and become a
lawyer, had helped nominate and elect Lincoln to Con-
gress, in 1853 practicing law for a year in Mobile, Alabama,
then moving to Kansas. In Leavenworth as a Democrat he
started the Territorial Register and upheld Douglas' "popu-
lar sovereignty." But after six months of the violence and

268

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

terror of proslavery mobs and wild shooting horsemen
from Missouri, he changed policy and his paper became an
outspoken and vehement antislavery organ. While he was
attending a Free State convention in 1855 at Lawrence,
the proslavery "Kickapoo Rangers" wrecked his newspaper
office and threw the type and part of the press into the Mis-
souri River. He had helped organize the Republican party
of Kansas and against a strong Seward-for-President op-
position was doing his best for Lincoln. He had asked Lin-
coln to endorse him for U.S. Senator and Lincoln had re-
plied, "Any open attempt on my part would injure you."

Delahay had a well-modeled face, a head of thick curly
hair, a full beard and mustache, and habits of overtalking
and overdrinking. At a small dinner party in his home, he
rose from his chair, waved a carving knife and called out,
"Gentlemen, I tell you, Mr. Lincoln will be our next presi-
dent." Lincoln put in, "Oh, Delahay, hush," but Delahay
shouted, "I feel it. I mean it." As the dishes were passed
they may have discussed John A. Martin, later a governor
of Kansas. As a sour and bitter pro-Seward man and as edi-
tor of the Atchison Champion, Martin let no item of news
be printed in his paper about Lincoln's arrival in Atchison,
reporting no word of Lincoln's speech to an Atchison audi-
ence.

Back in Springfield after nine days away, Lincoln wrote
political letters. He tried to smooth over the bitter feud in
the Republican party between Long John Wentworth and
Norman B. Judd. Wentworth had published that Judd was
linked with corruption and Judd had sued for libel, the
Chicago Tribune backing him to the hilt. Lincoln suggested
that Wentworth print a retraction and Judd drop his suit,
for the sake of party unity, but no such actions came and in
county and state conventions the WentW9rth-Judd feud
went on.

On December 20 Lincoln sent Jesse Fell the requested
autobiography. His father and mother came from "second
families." Indiana, where he grew up, "was a wild region."
And his schooling? <c There was absolutely nothing to ex-
cite ambition for education. Of course when I came of age
I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write,

"Only Events Can Make a President" 269

and cipher to the Rule of Three; but that was all. I have
not been to school since. The little advance I now have
upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to
time under the pressure of necessity." His country drawl
was there. "I was raised to farm work." He closed, saying
he had a "dark complexion, with coarse black hair, and
grey eyes — no other marks or brands recollected." He
noted for Fell, 'There is not much of it, for the reason, I
suppose, that there is not much of me. Of course, it must
not appear to have been written by myself." Fell's Penn-
sylvania friend elaborated on the facts sent him and pub-
lished in the Chester County Times a sketch going "all out"
for Lincoln for President, many other papers reprinting it.

Letters kept coming about the House Divided speech.
Just what did it mean? He would quote its opening para-
graph, and write: "It puzzles me to make my meaning
plainer. Look over it carefully, and conclude I meant all I
said and did not mean anything I did not say, and you will
have my meaning." And to close, "If you . . . will state to
me some meaning which you suppose I had, I can, and will
instantly tell you whether that was my meaning."

To a letter about the tariff question, he replied, "I have
not thought much upon the subject recently . . . just now,
the revival of that question, will not advance the cause
itself, or the man who revives it ... I should prefer, to
not now, write a public letter upon the subject. I therefore
wish this to be considered confidential." His decisions and
choices in politics were dictated by swift-moving events.
To Trumbull and all Republicans he made it clear he would
not try for the U.S. senatorshp in 1860; he and Trumbull
were not rivals. "And yet I would rather have a full term
in the Senate than in the Presidency," he wrote to Judd.

In April he had written T. J. Pickett* a Rock Island edi-
tor, "I must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for
the Presidency." In July 1859 he had written Samuel Gallo-
way, a Columbus, Ohio, lawyer, "I must say I do not think
myself fit for the Presidency." In November he wrote to a
Pennsylvania man, W. E. Frazer, an intimation that he
might be in the running. "I shall labor faithfully in the
ranks, unless, as I think not probable, the judgment of the

270

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

party shall assign me a different position." He knew Frazer
was "feeling him out" and made clear he could enter no
"combination ... to the prejudice of all others." Still later
he seemed to have an understanding with Norman Judcl
that he was to run for U.S. Senator in 1864 and toward that
goal it would help if the Illinois delegates in the coming
national convention were an instructed unit to vote for him
for the presidential nomination. He wrote Judd, "I am not
in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be
nominated on the national ticket; but I am where it would
hurt some for me to not get the Illinois delegates."

For nearly a year Lincoln had on hand what he called his
"Scrap-book," writing, "It cost me a good deal of labor to
get it up." From duplicate newspaper files he had clipped
column by column, with careful scissoring, his and Doug-
las' main speeches of 1858 along with the full text of the
Lincoln-Douglas debates. His own speeches were clipped
from the friendly Chicago Press & Tribune while Douglas'
speeches were clipped from the Chicago Times. These clip-
pings he pasted neatly, two columns to a page, in a scrap-
book bound in black boards, nine inches wide by 14 long,
95 pages numbered. He wrote on margins a few corrections
and in scores of places his pencil struck out "Applause"
or "Laughter" or "Cheers" or remarks shouted from the
audience. In one place Douglas had nodded to a man, say-
ing he knew this man would not vote for Lincoln, which

the man seconded with a fast and blunt, "I'll be d d if

I do," and this Lincoln edited out.

In December came a letter from high Republican lead-
ers in Ohio asking "for publication in permanent form"
of the great debates of 1858. Lincoln wrote December 19
he was grateful for "the very flattering terms" of their re-
quest and, "I wish the reprint to be precisely as the copies
I send, without any comment whatever." In January the
Chicago Press & Tribune carried news that Ohio Republi-
cans were publishing the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a cam-
paign document, the Springfield Journal clipping it and
adding it was "a most delicate and expressive compliment
. . . The name of 'Old Abe,' the leader of the great Repub-
lican army of the Northwest, has become a word of power

"Only Events Can Make a President'' 271

and might." Other newspapers chimed in. That the book
would come off the press and go to an immense audience
of readers gave Lincoln a quiet pride in the first book for
which he had furnished a manuscript.

There would be readers enjoying such sentences as, "The
Judge has set about seriously trying to make the impres-
sion that when we meet at different places I am literally
in his clutches — that I am a poor, helpless, decrepit mouse,"
or, "I don't want to have a fight with Judge Douglas, and I
have no way of making an argument up into the consistency
of a corn-cob and stopping his mouth with it." Or the grind-
ing cadenced statement: "I believe the entire records of the
world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence
up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for
one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro
was not included in the Declaration of Independence. I
think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said
so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever
said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that
any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until
the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic
party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation."

The title page read: "Political Debates between Hon.
Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in the
Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois," the publishers
Follett, Foster & Company, Columbus, Ohio. The book
held the awesome heave and surge of the slavery issue and
its companion, the dark threat of the Union dissolved. It
gave the passionate devotion of Douglas to an ocean-bound
republic of free white men, with what he termed "the infe-
rior races," the Negro, the Indian, the Chinese coolie,
barred from citizenship — and Lincoln's thousand-faceted
defense of the clause, "that all men are created equal," and
his high cries against the spread of slavery. In a sense, the
book was a master mural of the American people in a
given year. «

Lincoln one October morning in 1859 "came rushing
into the office," wrote Herndon, in his hands a letter invit-
ing him to lecture in Brooklyn, in Plymouth Church, on

272

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

the platform of Henry Ward Beecher. He thought it over,
consulted with Herndon and others, and wrote the com-
mittee chairman, "I believe, after all, I shall make a politi-
cal speech of it." Then over the winter weeks of late 1859
and early 1860 he toiled on the speech, at the State Li-
brary sinking himself in the Congressional Globe, the An-
nals of Congress, fingering through old mellowed newspaper
files, in his office worming his way through his own six-
volume Elliot's Debates on the Federal Constitution. This
was to be no stump speech to prairie farmers. He would
face a sophisticated metropolitan audience. The Chicago
Press & Tribune on February 16, 1860, had sweepingly en-
dorsed Lincoln for president, his character "the peer of any
man yet named . . . more certain to carry Illinois and In-
diana than any one else . . . great breadth and acuteness
of intellect" and Lincoln would "never be President by vir-
tue of intrigue and bargain." On February 23, as Lincoln
left Springfield for New York, the Illinois State Register
took its fling as to the coming speech: "Subject, not known,
Consideration, $200 and expenses. Object, presidential cap-
ital. Effect, disappointment."

Arriving in New York he learned that the Young Men's
Republican Union of New York City had arranged for
his speech to be given in Cooper Union. At the Astor
House he saw visitors, refused invitations to speak in New
Jersey, "went on working at his speech, noticed the Tribune
called him "a man of the people, a champion of free labor."
A Springfield Democrat, M. Brayman, wrote a letter Feb-
ruary 27 telling of being at dinner with Lincoln, and ad-
mirers came to their table. "He turned x half round and
talked 'hoss' to them— introduced me as a Democrat, but
one so good tempered that he and I could 'eat out of the
same rack, without a pole between us/ "

A snowstorm interfered with traffic, and on the night of
February 27 the Cooper Union audience didn't fill all the
seats. About 1,500 people came, most of them paying the
25 cents admission; the door receipts were $367. The Trib-
une said that "since the days of Clay and Webster" there
hadn't been a larger assemblage of the "intellect and moral
culture" of the city of New York.

"Only Events Can Make a President" 273

Hie eminent attorney, David Dudley Field, escorted the
speaker to the platform, where among distinguished guests
sat the innocent-faced Horace Greeley. William Cullen
Bryant j editor of the Evening Post, author of "Thanatopsis"
and "To a Waterfowl," told the audience of Lincoln's ma-
jority for the senatorship in Illinois and the legislative ap-
portionment that elected Douglas. Bryant closed, "I have
only, my friends, to pronounce the name of Abraham Lin-
coln of Illinois [loud cheering], to secure your profoundest
attention."

A tall, gaunt frame came forward, on it a long, new suit
of broadcloth, hanging creased and rumpled as it came out
of his satchel. Applause began; the orator smiled, put his
left hand to the lapel of his coat, and so stood as the greet-
ing slowed down. "Mr. Cheerman" he said with Kentucky
tang in his opening. He was slow getting started. There were
Republicans not sure whether to laugh or feel sorry. As he
got into his speech there came a change. They saw he had
thought his way deeply among the issues and angers of the
hour. He quoted Douglas: "Our fathers, when they framed
the Government under which we live, understood this ques-
tion [of slavery] just as well, and even better, than we do
now." And who might these "fathers" be? Included must be
the 39 framers of the original Constitution and the 76 mem-
bers of the Congress who framed the amendments. And he
went into a crisscross of roll calls, quotations, documents
in established history, to prove "the fathers" held the Re-
publican party view of restricting slavery. Did any one of
"the fathers" ever say that the Federal Government should
not have the power to control slavery in the Federal Terri-
tories? "I defy any man to show that any one of them ever,
in his whole life, declared that." He said "neither the word
'slave' nor 'slavery' is to be found in the Constitution, nor
the word 'property' even." They called the slave a "person."
His master's legal right to him was phrased as "service or
labor which may be due." Their purpose was "to exclude
from the Constitution the idea that there could be property
in man."

If the Republican party was "sectional" it was because
of the Southern sectional efforts to extend slavery. The

274

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Republicans were not radical nor revolutionary but con-
servative and in line with the "fathers" who framed the
Constitution. Yet, "I do not mean to say we are bound to
follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so,
would be to discard all the lights of current experience — -to
reject all progress — all improvement." There were those
saying they could "not abide the election of a Republican
President," in which event they would destroy the Union.
"And then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it
will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol
to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and de-
liver, or I shall kill you, and-ihen you will be a murderer!' "

Slave insurrections couldn't be blamed on the young Re-
publican party; 23 years before the slave Nat Turner led a
revolt in Virginia where three times as many lives were lost ,
as at Harpers Ferry. "In the present state of things in the
United States, I do not think a general, or even a very ex-
tensive slave insurrection, is possible . . . The slaves have no
means of rapid communication . . . The explosive materials
are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are, nor can be
supplied, the indispensable connecting trains. Much is said
by Southern people about the affection of slaves for their
masters and mistresses; and a part of it, at least, is true." In
any uprising plot among 20 individual slaves, "some one
of them, to save the life of a favorite master or mistress,
would divulge it . . . John Brown's effort . . . was an at-
tempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in
which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so ab-
surd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly
enough it could not succeed."

In the quiet of some moments the only sound competing
with the speaker's voice was the steady sizzle of the burn-
ing gaslights. The audience spread before him in a wide
quarter-circle. Thick pillars sprang from floor to ceiling,
white trunks dumb, inhuman. But the wide wedges of faces
between were listening. "And now, if they would listen — as
I suppose they will not— I would address a few words to
the Southern people." Then he dealt in simple words with
the terrible ropes of circumstance that snarled and meshed
the two sections of the country:

"Only Events Can Make a President" 275

"The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply
this: We must not only let them alone, but we must, some-
how, convince them that we do let them alone . . . Wrong as
we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where
it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from
its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our
votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National
Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States?
If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our
duty, fearlessly and effectively."

He reasoned: "All they ask, we could readily grant, if
we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily
grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and
our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which de-
pends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do,
they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as
being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield
to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against
our own?" To search for middle ground between the right
and the wrong would be "vain as the search for a man who
should be neither a living man nor a dead man." He fin-
ished: "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in
that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we un-
derstand it."

Applause came, outcries and cheers; hats went in the air
and handkerchiefs waved; they crowded to shake the speak-
er's hand; a reporter blurted, "He's the greatest man since
St. Paul" and scurried away to write: "No man ever before
made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York
audience."

The committee member, Charles C. Nott, walked with
Lincoln, saw him limping and asked,- "Are you lame, Mr.
Lincoln?" No, he wasn't lame; his new boots hurt his feet.
They boarded a horse-drawn streetcar, and rode to where
Nott had to hop off for the nearest way home. He told Lin-
coln just to keep on riding and the car would take him to
the Astor House. And Nott watching the car go bumping
up the street wasn't sure he had done right to get off; Lin-
coln looked sad and lonesome like a figure blown in with
the drifts of the snowstorm.

276 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

In the morning Lincoln saw that four papers printed his
speech in full, and learned there would be a pamphlet re-
print of it. Brady photographed him; as the picture came
out he looked a little satisfied with himself; it wasn't the
usual sad face. But people liked it.

This week Joseph Medill in Washington sent to the Chi-
cago Press & Tribune an editorial arguing that Lincoln
could be elected President that year and Seward couldn't.
Seward read it, hunted up Medill, and as Medill told it:
"Seward 'blew me up' tremendously for having disappointed
him, and preferring that 'prairie statesman,' as he called
Lincoln. He gave me to understand that he was the chief
teacher of the principles of the Republican party before
Lincoln was known other than as a country lawyer in Illi-
nois." The background instigators of Lincoln's appearance
at Cooper Union were a faction long opposed to Seward and
Weed; they were pleased to see Seward's stature cut down
a little; they may have crossed their fingers when Lincoln
asked for "harmony, one with another" and said, "Even
though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion
and ill temper."

Lincoln spoke for his party in New England and visited
his boy, Robert, in school at Exeter, New Hampshire. At
Hartford, the report ran, he cited one-sixth of the popula-
tion of the United States looked upon as property, as noth-
ing but property. 'The cash value of these slaves, at a mod-
erate estimate, is $2,000,000,000. This amount of property
value has a vast influence on the minds of its owners, very
naturally. The same amount of property would have an
equal influence upon us if owned in the North. Human
nature is the same — people at the South are the same as
those at the North, barring the difference in circumstances."

Shoe factory workers on strike said they couldn't live on
their wages of $250 a year. Douglas laid the strike on "this
unfortunate sectional warfare"; Lincoln replied, "Thank
God that we have a system of labor where there can be a
strike." Thus at Hartford. At New Haven, the Daily Pal-
ladium reported him: "I do not pretend to know all about
the matter . . . / am glad to see that a system of labor pre-
vails in New England under which laborers can strike when

"Maiy, We're Elected" 277

they want to [Cheers,] where they are not obliged to work
under all circumstances, and are not tied down and obliged
to labor whether you pay them or not! [Cheers.] I like the
system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it
might prevail everywhere. [Tremendous applause.] ... I
don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it
would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose
any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest
man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. [Ap-
plause.]"

He made speeches in Providence, Concord, Manchester,
Dover, New Haven, Meriden, Norwich, and finally in
Bridgeport on March 10, usually to "capacity audiences,"
several times escorted by brass bands and torchlight pro-
cessions of cheering Republicans. About midway he wrote
his wife, "I have been unable to escape this toil. If I had
foreseen it, I think I would not have come east at all." He
was hard put to make nine speeches "before reading audi-
ences who had already seen all my ideas in print." He
turned down invitations to speak in Philadelphia, Reading
and Pittsburgh, being "far worn down." He thanked James
A. Briggs for a $200 check for the Cooper Union speech,
begged off any more speaking dates, but on March 1 1 did
go with Briggs to hear Beecher preach in Brooklyn and to
attend the Universalist Church of Edwin H. Chapin in New
York. The next day he took the Erie Railroad for Chicago
and two days later was home in Springfield, arriving, said
the Journal, "in excellent health and in his usual spirits."

Chapter 14

"Mary, We're Elected"

William H. Seward, eight years older than Lincoln, lead-
ing all other candidates for the Republican presidential
nomination, was a New Yorker of Welsh-Irish stock, a
slim, middle-sized man, stooped, white-haired, with a

278 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

pointed nose, a slouching walk, a plain conversational
tone in public speaking, "eyes secret but penetrating, a sub-
tle, quick man, rejoicing in power." His friend and man-
ager, Thurlow Weed, publisher of the Albany Evening
Journal, ran a Seward publicity bureau, was in touch with
large special interests and made free use of money in pro-
moting Seward.

When governor of New York, Seward had brought into
effect laws requiring jury trial for fugitive slaves, with de-
fense counsel fees paid by the state. In the U.S. Senate,
replying to Webster, Seward had said, '*. . . there is a
higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our au-
thority over the domain." In October 1858 he spoke of the
slavery issue as not "the work of fanatical agitators," but
rather, "It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and
enduring forces, and it means that the United States must
and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-
holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation."

Southern voices and papers called him "monstrous and
diabolical," some of his own advisers telling him he had
gone too radical. He had retreated into explanations that
he wasn't as radical as he sounded, but a stigma hung on
him. While Lincoln went on month after month quoting
from his House Divided speech, Seward refused to refresh
memories about his "higher law" and "irrepressible con-
flict" Lincoln's speech had a mystic songlike quality while
Seward's was bare intellectual doctrine.

Handsome, portly, overdignified Salmon P. Chase of
Ohio, antislavery, radical, had twice been governor and
served a term as U.S. Senator; he would get delegates from
Ohio and elsewhere but didn't seem formidable. Judge
Edward Bates of Missouri would have that state's delegates
and a scattered following from elsewhere. He was 67, had
married a South Carolinian's daughter who bore him 17
children. He had been a Whig Congressman and his back-
ers said that as a Free-Soil Whig from a Border Slave State
he would avert secession. He was smallish, bearded, a mod-
erate Old Line Whig who kept a diary that whispered to
him he would be President In 1856 he had been a leader
in an Old Line Whig convention at Baltimore which en-

"Maiy, We're Elected" 279

dorsed the American [Know-Nothing] party and he didn't
know the full force of German editors and political lead-
ers who had axes out for him and would throw a fierce
strength against him.

John McLean, an Ohio Democrat, appointed associate
justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by President Jackson,
was in the running, his dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott
case being in his favor. He was 75, and Lincoln wrote to
Trumbull, "I do not believe he would accept it [the nomi-
nation]; ... If he were ten years younger he would be our
best candidate." McLean's health was failing and he was to
die within a year, but he was mentioned in reckonings that
did not include Lincoln.

Before mid-May the Lincoln-Douglas debates book, at
50 cents in paper or $1.00 clothbound, was to go into four
editions; the pamphlet reprints of,the Cooper Union speech
were selling at one cent the copy, and there was a growing
legend spreading wider of the tall homely man who was
log-cabin born and had been flatboatman and rail splitter,
struggling on to where his speech and thought were read
nationwide. All this had created an aura about Lincoln
that in the few weeks now left before the national Repub-
lican convention in May was to be the more effective be-
cause it was no forced growth. It had a way of dawning
on men, "Why, yes, come to think of it, why not Lincoln?
The more you look at him the more he is the man."

He had in 1859 traveled 4,000 miles to make 23 Republi-
can speeches. He had covered more ground over America
than any others of his party mentioned for President; born
in Kentucky, he had traversed the Mississippi River in a
flatboat to New Orleans, had lived in the national capital,
had met audiences over all the Midwest as far out as Kan-
sas, in New York City, and across New England. He had
purposely in public hidden his hopes and strengths as a
candidate and coming weeks would tell the results. He had
followed this course long before John Wentworth's advice
of February 6: "Look out for prominence. When it is as-
certained that none of the prominent candidates can be
nominated then ought to be your time."

Lincoln wrote to an Ohio delegate, of the coming Chi-

r

280 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

cago convention, that Seward "is the very best candidate
we could have for the North of Illinois, and the very worst
for the South of it." With Chase of Ohio it would be the
same, while Bates of Missouri would be the best for the
south of Illinois and the worst for the north. And Judge
McLean, if 15 or even 10 years younger, would be stronger
than either Seward or Bates. "I am not the fittest person to
answer the questions you ask [about candidates]. When not
a very great man begins to be mentioned for a very great
position, his head is very likely to be a little turned."

With Trumbull he would be "entirely frank," writing,
'The taste is in my mouth a little." He repeated for Trum-
bull his view of the Seward, Chase and Bates followings
in Illinois. Three small-town newspapers in Illinois had
nominated Trumbull for President; the taste was a little in
his mouth too and while he regarded himself as one of the
darker dark horses, he favored McLean as against Lincoln,
who had secured his election as U.S. Senator.

To another Ohio delegate Lincoln wrote: "Our policy,
then, is to give no offence to others — leave them in a mood
to come to us, if they shall be compelled to give up their
first love. This, too, is dealing justly with all, and leaving
us in a mood to support heartily whoever shall be nomi-C
nated." In a Bloomington speech in April, he thrust at
the Douglas logic: "If I cannot rightfully murder a man, I
may tie him to the tail of a kicking horse, and let him kick
the man to death."

Mark Delahay, as the Lincoln leader in Kansas, asked
for money, Lincoln replying: "Allow me to say I can not
enter the ring on the money basis — first, because, in the
main, it is wrong; and secondly, I have not, and can not
get, the money. I say, in the main, the use of money is
wrong; but for certain objects, in a political contest, the
use of some, is both right, and indispensable." He could
make a distinct offer: "If you shall be appointed a delegate
to Chicago, I will furnish one hundred dollars to bear the
expences of the trip." In a second letter after Kansas elected
a pro-Seward delegation he wrote to Delahay, "Come along
to the convention, & I will do as I said about expenses."

Into the state Republican convention at Decatur on May 9

"Mary, We're Elected" 281

came John Hanks carrying two fence rails tied with flags
and streamers, with the inscription, "Abraham Lincoln, the
Rail Candidate for President in 1860: Two rails from a lot
of 3,000 made in 1830 by Thos* Hanks and Abe Lincoln —
whose father was the first pioneer of Macon County."
Shouts followed: "Lincoln! Lincoln! Speech!" He thanked
them with a sober face. Cheers: "Three times three for
Honest Abe, our next President." Shouts from the conven-
tion: "Identify your work!" "It may be that I split these
rails," and scrutinizing further, "Well, boys, I can only
say that I have split a great many better-looking ones."

Thus the Rail Candidate was brought forth, and the nick-
name of Rail Splitter. The idea came from Richard
Oglesby, a Decatur lawyer, Kentucky-raised, a plain and
witty man, who shared Lincoln's belief in the people. He
had hunted out John Hanks and planned the dramatiza-
tion of Lincoln as "the Rail Splitter." Far more important
was it that the convention instructed its delegates to the
Chicago convention to vote as a unit for Lincoln; 7 of the
22 delegates personally preferred Seward, and Orville H.
Browning's choice was Bates.

Two weeks earlier, at the national Democratic conven-
tion in Charleston, South Carolina, where the Douglas dele-
gates held a majority control, but lacking the necessary
two-thirds to nominate their hero, slavery men had split
the party, and two separate wings of it were to hold conven-
tions in June. The answers of Douglas to Lincoln in the
Freeport debate and his break with the Buchanan adminis-
tration had lost nearly all former trust of the South in him.
William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, tall, slender, with
long black hair, spoke in a soft, musical yet tense voice for
the minority. "The proposition you make, will bankrupt us
of the South. Ours is the property invaded— ours the in-
terests at stake . . . You would make a great seething cal-
dron of passion and crime if you were able to consummate
your measures." Ten days of speeches, ballots, wrangles,
brought adjournment to Baltimore in June. Now it was
taken as certain that there would be two Democratic par-
ties in the field, one Northern, the other Southern, and Re-
publican victory in November almost sure.

282 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

On May 9 in Baltimore was organized the new Consti-
tutional Union party with a short platform calling for the
maintenance of the Constitution, the Union and law en-
forcement. For President they nominated John Bell of
Tennessee, a former Whig Congressman and U.S. Senator,
for Vice President, Edward Everett, a former Secretary of
State and president of Harvard University. Not much was
expected from them; their platform was not merely simple
but too simple.

Illinois delegates were outfitting with silk hats and broad-
cloth suits for the Chicago Republican convention May
16. Lincoln was saying, "I am a little too much a candi-
date to stay home and not quite enough a candidate to go."
Judd and others had made a special point of getting the
convention for Chicago. They told the national committee
that holding the convention in an eastern city would "run
a big chance of losing the West." Chicago had become a
symbol for audacity, enterprise and onward % stride. Its
population of 29,000 in 1850 had become 80,000 in 1855,
and 109,000 in 1860; it betokened the "great Northwest"
that had wrought transformations in American national
politics. Its trade in hogs, cattle, wheat, corn, farm ma-
chinery, and the associated finance and transportation,
made it the depot and crossroads for thousand-mile prairies.
Out of it ran 15 railway lines with 150 railroad trams 4 a
day; on May 16, 1860, they had brought an estimated
40,000 strangers and 500 delegates to the convention. At
the corner of Lake and Market Streets the Sauganash
Hotel had been torn down, and a huge rambling lumber
structure, to hold 10,000 people, had been put up and
named the Wigwam. Chicago girls and women, with the
help of young men, had made the big barnlike interior gay
and brilliant with flags, bunting and streamers of red, white
and blue.

Judge David Davis had adjourned the Eighth Circuit
courts, took over the entire third floor of Chicago's finest
hotel, the Tremont House, paying a rental of $300 for spa-
cious Lincoln headquarters and rooms for his staff of Lin-
coln hustlers, evangelists, salesmen, pleaders, extorters,
schemers. Jesse Fell, once a Pennsylvanian, could mix with

"Mary, We're Elected" 283

and interpret the pivotal Keystone delegates. Judd, as a
railroad lawyer of close association with a Pennsylvania del-
egate who was a railroad lawyer, could make honest prom-
ises to the powerful interests who wanted a Pacific railway
and other benefits. Leonard Swett, as a young man from
Maine, might break, as he did, the Seward unity of that
state's delegates. Richard J. Oglesby, as a Whig Free-Soiler
raised in Kentucky, would do his best with his rough hearty
jargon among the Kentucky delegates and those from Mis-
souri. John M. Palmer, a loyal Democrat until the Kansas-
Nebraska Bill, would be effective among former Democrats,
while Gustave Koerner, the German-born refugee, would
be a demon at breaking down the chances of Bates who
in 1856 had lent his name to the Know-Nothings.

Judge Stephen T. Logan, William H. Herndon, Ward
Hill Lamon, who knew Lincoln from close association,
could testify where needed in personal talk with doubtful
delegates. Helping on many errands and interviews would
be the lawyers William W. Orme of Bloomington and
Nathan M. Knapp of Winchester. Illinois state treasurer,
William Butler, at whose house Lincoln once boarded, and
Ozias M. Hatch, Illinois secretary of state, were no green*
horns in politics, and Jesse K. Dubois, state auditor, was
about the closest coadjutor of the shrewd chief manipula-
tor, Judge Davis. A born trader and man of affairs, Davis
owned 10,000 acres of land in Iowa, many farms and tracts
in Illinois, and was often rated a millionaire.

In the parlor of the Lincoln headquarters were cigars
and wine, porter, brandy, whisky, for any delegate or im-
portant guest; the total bill, $321.50, was paid by Hatch and
Lamon. They called in delegates and held quiet private
talks or made speeches to groups; Thurlow Weed at his
Seward headquarters in the Richmond House was using the
same methods. Medill and Charles H. Ray of the Tribune
were on hand with ideas and their influence. Weaving from
caucus to caucus were Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania
and Henry S. Lane of Indiana; each was running for gov-
ernor in his state and each solemnly positive that their
states would be lost if Seward was nominated. The same
gospel of gloom about Seward came from David Dudley

284 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Field, George Opdyke and other New Yorkers who had
come on to stop Seward. Innocent-faced Horace Greeley
went hither and yon saying he had only goodwill toward
Seward but the man to carry the country was Bates. A long
roll could be called of the delegates who day and night
buttonholed others and told them Seward couldn't carry
the doubtful states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana
and Illinois.

From the midwest states people had swarmed into Chi-
cago, proud and curious about the first great national con-
vention to be held so far west. New York had sent a thou-
sand to shout and cheer for Seward; among them was Tom
Hyer, the champion heavyweight prize fighter. Pennsyl-
vania sent 1,500 marchers to see the big show and help
Pennsylvania. A Wisconsin delegate had to register at a
cheap hotel where, after inspecting the bed, as he told it,
"I spent the rest of the night in a chair, as sure as my name
is Carl Schurz." Processions with brass bands and bright
nobby uniforms marched, cheering candidates. During the
three days of the convention the crowd outside the Wig-
wam was two and three times the size of the one inside; re-
lays of orators made speeches. A thousand saloons had
customers making holiday and hullabaloo. Mark Delahay
wrote two rambling, boozy letters to Lincoln, reporting
in his way that the confusion was confounding.

Delegate Knapp wrote to Lincoln May 14: "We are la-
boring to make you the second choice of all the Delegations
we can where we can not make you first choice. We are
dealing tenderly with delegates, taking them in detail, and
making no fuss . . . brace your nerves for any result."

The day before the convention opened, May 15, Davis
and Dubois wired Lincoln: "We are quiet but moving
heaven & Earth. Nothing will beat us but old fogy politi-
cians." The next day Judd's message was: "Dont be fright-
ened. Keep cool. Things is working." On the afternoon
of May 17 the platform was adopted in a sweep of yells
and cheers. The Seward men then wanted to ballot on can-
didates; a motion to that effect was made but the chair said
"the tally-sheets had not been prepared" and on a quick
motion to adjourn and by a light unrecorded vote, Chair-

"Mary, We're Elected" 285

man George Ashmun announced the motion prevailed and
the convention was adjourned. The moment was fateful;
Seward men believed they could have nominated their man
that afternoon. That May 17 the main Lincoln backers
worked all night and clinched important deals. Davis tele-
graphed Lincoln: "Am very hopeful. Dont be Excited.
Nearly dead with fatigue. Telegraph or write here very
little."

Dubois and other Lincoln men went into conference
with the Pennsylvania and Indiana delegations. "We worked
like nailers," said Oglesby. Ray of the Tribune came to his
chief, Medill. "We are going to have Indiana for Old Abe,
sure." "How did you get it?" asked Medill. "By the Lord,
we promised them everything they asked." Caleb B. Smith
was to be Secretary of the Interior and William P. Dole,
Commissioner of Indian Affairs; Indiana would vote a solid
block for Lincoln on the first ballot. Pennsylvania with its
block of 54 delegates wearing white hats would vote for
Simon Cameron, as a favorite son, on the first ballot, and
then were willing to go elsewhere. Judge Davis dickered
with them; Dubois telegraphed Lincoln the Cameron dele-
gates could be had if Cameron was promised the Treasury
Department. Lincoln wired back, "I authorize no bargains
and will be bound by none."

A message from Lincoln was carried to Chicago by Ed-
ward L. Baker, editor of the Springfield Journal; it was a
copy of a newspaper with markings of Seward speeches,
with Lincoln's marginal notes, "I agree with Seward's 'Ir-
repressible Conflict,' but I do not endorse his 'Higher Law'
doctrine," and then Lincoln's underlined words, "Make no
contracts that will bind me." Why Lincoln should send such
cryptic messages to old companions who were losing sleep,
spending money and toiling fearfully to make him Presi-
dent was anybody's guess. He may have believed that in
the rush and heat of events some corrupt bargain might be
made, and he would have these messages to show. Defi-
nitely, too, out of his many years of close association with
him he knew Davis' mind, will and conscience, and such
peremptory messages from him would not stop the judge
from a resolved purpose to nominate Lincoln.

286

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

What happened next was told by Whitney: "The bluff
Dubois said, 'Damn Lincoln!' The polished Swett said, T
am very sure if Lincoln was aware of the necessities — "
The critical Logan expectorated, The main difficulty with
Lincoln is — ' Hemdon ventured, 'Now, friend, I'll answer
that.' But Davis cut the Gordian knot by brushing all aside
with, 'Lincoln ain't here, and don't know what we have to
meet, so we will go ahead, as if we hadn't heard from him,
and he must ratify it!' "

In that mood they went to the Pennsylvania managers.
When they were through they came down to the lobby of
the Tremont House, where Medill of the Tribune had been
smoking and thinking about a remark of Lincoln's that
Pennsylvania would be important in the convention. As
Medill saw 300-pound Judge Davis come heaving and puff-
ing down the stairs about midnight, he stepped up to the
judge and, as he told it later, asked him what Pennsylvania
was going to do. And Judge Davis: "Damned if we haven't
got them." "How did you get them?" "By paying their
price."

Then came Ray, who had sat in and heard. And Medill
asked his editor how Pennsylvania had been nailed down.
"Why," said Ray, "we promised to put Simon Cameron
in the Cabinet. TTiey wanted assurances that we represented
Lincoln, and he would do what we said." "What have you
agreed to give Cameron?" asked Medill. "The Treasury
Department" "Good heavens! Give Cameron the Treasury
Department? What will be left?" "Oh, what is the differ-
ence?" said Ray. "We are after a bigger thing than that;
we want the Presidency and the Treasury is not a great
stake to pay for it."

And so, with three state delegations solid, and with odd
votes from Ohio and other states, the Lincoln men waited
for the balloting, seeing to it, however, that the convention
seating committee carefully sandwiched the Pennsylvania
delegation between Illinois and Indiana.

When the platform was adopted the day before, leaving
out mention of the Declaration of Independence, old
Joshua R. Giddings arose, and said it was time to walk out
of the Republican party. Then young George William Cur-

"Mary, We're Elected" 287

tis of Harper's Weekly stood up and shamed the conven-
tion; the principle of the equality of men was written in
and Giddings stayed on.

Seward victory was in the air; champagne fizzed at the
Richmond House. Straw votes on all incoming railroad
trains had given Seward overwhelming majorities. Michi-
gan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, were a unit for Seward, as were
the New York, Massachusetts (except four who were for
Lincoln) and California delegations. Horace Greeley wired
his New York Tribune that Seward seemed sure to win.
Lincoln workers were saying with clenched fists and blaz-
ing eyes that the Republicans were beaten at the start if
Seward headed the ticket. They scared a definite element
who wanted to win; and again there were antislavery men
such as Bryant of the New York Evening Post who believed
Seward to be the same type as Daniel Webster, much intel-
lect, little faith, none of the "mystic simplicity" of Lincoln.

Lamon had been to the printers of seat tickets. Young
men worked nearly a whole night signing names of conven-
tion officers to counterfeit seat tickets so that next day
Lincoln men could jam the hall and leave no seats for the
Seward shouters. Hour on hour the bulk of the 40,000
strangers in Chicago kept up noise and tumult for Abra-
ham Lincoln, for Old Abe, for the Rail Candidate. Judd
had fixed it with the railroads so that any shouter who
wished could set foot in Chicago at a low excursion rate.
Men illuminated with moral fire, and others red-eyed with
whisky, yelled, pranced, cut capers and vociferated for
Lincoln.

On the first two days of the convention's routine business
the Seward men were allowed by the Chicago managers to
have free run of the floor. But on May 18, when sunrise
saw thousands milling about the Wigwam doors, the Lin-
coln shouters were shoved through the doors till they filled
all seats and standing room; hundreds of New York hurrah
boys couldn't squeeze in. Lamon and Fell got a thousand
men recruited for their lung power; they had been given
tickets and were on hand. They watched their leaders, two
men located on opposite sides of the Wigwam. One of
them, Dr. Ames of Chicago, it was said, could "on a calm

288

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

day" be heard clear across Lake Michigan. The other one,
brought by Delegate Burton Cook from Ottawa, could give
out with a warm monster voice. These two Leather Lungs
watched Cook on the platform; when he took out his hand-
kerchief they cut loose with all they had and kept it up till
Cook put his handkerchief back. They were joined by the
thousand recruits picked for voice noise.

Nomination speeches were in single sentences. Judd said,
"I desire, on behalf of the delegation from Illinois, to put
in nomination, as a candidate for President of the United
States, Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois." Here Cook took out
his handkerchief. "The idea of us Hoosiers and Suckers
being outscreamed would have been bad," said Swett. "Five
thousand people leaped to their seats, women not wanting,
and the wild yell made vesper breathings of all that had
preceded. A thousand steam whistles, ten acres of hotel
gongs, a tribe of Comanches might have mingled in the
scene unnoticed."

Seward had 173 Vi votes, Lincoln 102, and favorite sons
and others the remainder of the votes on the first ballot.
On the second ballot, Lincoln jumped to 181 as against
Seward's 184^. On the third ballot, of the 465 votes Lin-
coln swept 23 Wi while Seward dropped to 180. Medill of
the Tribune whispered to Cartter of Ohio, "If you can
throw the Ohio delegation for Lincoln, Chase can have any-
thing he wants." "H-how d'-d'ye know?" stuttered Cartter,
Medill answering, "I know, and you know I wouldn't prom-
ise if I didn't know."

Cartter called for a change of four votes from his state
to Lincoln. Other delegates announced changes of votes to
Lincoln. As the tellers footed up the totals, and the chair-
man waited for the figures, the chatter of 10,000 people
stopped, the fluttering of ladies' fans ended, the scratching
of pencils and the clicking of the telegraph dot-dash dash-
dot-dash could be heard. The 900 reporters from every-
where in America clutched their pencils.

The chairman spoke. Of 465 votes, 364 were cast for the
candidate highest, and "Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, is se-
lected as your candidate for President of the United States."

Chairmen of state delegations arose and made the norni-

"Maiy, We're Elected" 289

nation unanimous. The terrific emotional spree was over.
Strong men hugged each other, wept, laughed and shrieked
in each other's faces through tears. Judge Logan stood on a
table, brandished his arms and yelled, swung wild his new
silk hat and on somebody's head smashed it flat. Inside
and outside the Wigwam it was a wild noon hour; hats,
handkerchiefs, umbrellas, in the air; brass bands blaring;
cannon explosions on the roof getting answers from city
bells, riverboat and railroad whistles.

Hannibal Hamlin, the Maine senator, a former Demo-
crat, was nominated for Vice-President, and thanks voted
to the convention chairman, George Ashmun of Massachu-
setts. Seward's manager, Thurlow Weed, pressed the tem-
ples of his forehead to hold back tears but the tears came.
Greeley wrote it was a fearful week he hoped never to see
repeated. "If you had seen the Pennsylvania delegation,
and known how much money Weed had in hand, you
would not have believed we could do so well as we did . . .
We had to rain red-hot bolts on them, however, to keep
the majority from going for Seward."

Knapp telegraphed Lincoln: "We did it. Glory to God,"
and Fell: "City wild with excitement. From my inmost
heart I congratulate you." Swett warned, "Dont let any one
persuade you to come here," Dubois and Butler saying:
"Do not come without we telegraph you," Judd more brief:
"Do not come to Chicago," and Koerner briefest of all:
"Dont come here."

On May 18 Lincoln walked from home to his office and
was talking with two law students when the office door
burst open and the Journal editor, Baker, told him of the
first ballot in Chicago. They walked to the telegraph office,
found no later news, and at the Journal office met a crowd
shouting good news would be coming. Lincoln slouched in
a chair but straightened up at the next news of his big gains
on the second ballot. And when the wires sang that his
nomination had been made unanimous, he knew that a
great somber moment had come to him and the firing of
100 jubilant guns made a shadowed music. He read a flurry
of gay telegrams, shook hands all round, then went home

290

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

to tell the news and see his wife's face beam and glow. In
the afternoon he shook hands with many callers.

Bonfires of boxes, barrels and brushwood lighted up the
Sangamon River country that Friday night. A brass band
and a cheering crowd at the Lincoln house surged to the
front porch and called for a speech. He saw the honor of
the nomination not for him personally but as the represent-
ative of a cause; he wished his house big enough so he
could ask them all inside. Shouts and yells of hurrah par-
ties broke oh the night till the gray dawn of the morning
after.

Judge Davis answered a question on what the wild week
cost: "The entire expense of Lincoln's nomination, includ-
ing headquarters, telegraphing, music, fare of delegations,
and other incidentals, was less than $700."

Elements that Lincoln had described as "strange and dis-
cordant, gathered from the four winds," had formed a pow-
erful party of youth, wild banners, pilgrims of faith and
candlelight philosophers, besides hopeful politicians. Indus-
trial, transportation and financial interests found this party
promising. Pennsylvania, New York, New England, were
satisfied as to both the tariff and the outlook for opening up
the Great Plains to settlement and trade. "A Railroad to
the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the inter-
ests of the whole country; the Federal Government ought
to render immediate and efficient aid in its construction,"
read the Republican platform plank.

Hordes of politicians had hitched themselves to the Re-
publican party seeing it as a winner; the Government was
spending $80,000,000 a year; offices, contracts and favors
lay that way; in their connections these politicians had
manufacturing and mercantile interests, iron, steel, coal,
oil, railroads and steamboats.

In its platform promises on tariff, on land and homestead
laws, on farm and factory legislation to benefit working-
men, industry and business, the Republican party had a sin-
cerity, was attending to issues in degree long neglected or
evaded. Various practical interests saw to it that their po-
litical workers had front seats, committee places and influ-
ence in the new party. Before one issue all others shrank,

"Mary, We're Elected" 291

that of union and the wage-labor system as against disunion
and slave labor. Carl Schurz had yelled, to a storm of
cheers, "We defy the whole slave power and the whole
vassalage of hell." A cadence of exasperation, a strain of
revolutionary rumble and mutter, rose, died down, and rose
again.

The man in Springfield picked to carry the banner stood
at moments as a shy and furtive figure. He wanted the place
— and he didn't. His was precisely the clairvoyance that
knew terrible days were ahead. He had his hesitations. And
he was in the end the dark horse on whom the saddle was
put. He could contemplate an old proverb: "The horse
thinks one thing, he that saddles him another."

The notification committee at his house formally told
Lincoln he was nominated for President. He formally re-
plied, and later, after reading the platform, sent a letter of
acceptance. He would co-operate, "imploring the assistance
of Divine Providence."

In June the adjourned Democratic national convention
met in Baltimore, and after bitter and furious debates, nom-
inated Douglas of Illinois for President and Herschel John-
son, a Georgia unionist, for Vice-President. Delegates from
1 1 slave states walked out, bolted their old party, and nom-
inated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for President and
Joseph Lane of Oregon for Vice-President. They rejected
with scorn and hate Douglas' "popular sovereignty" and
his leadership; they believed with John Randolph who 40
years earlier had advised secession, saying, "Asking a state
to surrender part of her sovereignty is like asking a lady to
surrender part of her chastity." When Stephens of Georgia
was asked what he was thinking, "Why, that men will be
cutting one another's throats in a little while. In less than
twelve months we shall be in a war, and that the bloodiest
in history."

To Judge Davis came many letters asking how Lincoln,
if elected, would deal with patronage and offices, with party
factions, with coming issues and events. Davis requested
Lincoln to guide him in answering such letters. Lincoln
wrote May 26 for Davis "the body of such a letter as I

292

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

think you should write ... in your own handwriting," add-
ing whatever assurances Davis might "think fit." The letter
for Davis' use was vastly implicative, luminously shrewd
yet wise, comprehensive yet brief, as an indication in that
hour of the mingled peace and turmoil in Lincoln's mind
and conscience. It read:

Since parting with you, I have had full, and frequent
conversations with Mr. Lincoln. The substance of what
he says is that he neither is nor will be, in advance of
the election, committed to any man,' clique, or faction;
and that, in case the new administration shall devolve
upon him, it will be his pleasure, and, in his view, the
part of duty, and wisdom, to deal fairly with all. He
thinks he will need the assistance of all; and that, even
if he had friends to reward, or enemies to punish, as
he has not, he could not afford to dispense with the
best talents, nor to outrage the popular will in any
locality.

#46; a*~c» £&*j s a**** *f& A-ykO*

From original letter written by Lincoln to David Davis

Judge Davis kept close track of the Midwest campaign,
and August 24 wrote from Bloomington to Thurlow Weed
that he had been in Indiana and found the Republican
party in danger of losing that state. "They believe that with

"Mary, We're Elected" 293

$10,000 the State can be carried . . . The election may run
itself, as it is doing in a great many States, but, depend
upon it, without pecuniary aid, there can be neither cer-
tainty nor efficiency." Among those keeping Lincoln in
touch with the campaign machinery were Davis, Swett and
Judd. Errands between Illinois, New York and Pennsyl-
vania were indicated in a letter of Swett to Thurlow Weed:
"We should be exceedingly glad to know your wishes and
your views, and to serve you in any way in our power. I
say this freely for myself because I feel it, and for Judge
Davis, because, although now absent, I know his feelings.
Of course, nobody is authorized to speak for Mr. Lincoln."

Wide-Awake clubs of young men in uniforms marched
in torchlight processions. Seward spoke across the Northern
States; Lincoln went to the railway station to pay him a
cordial greeting when he passed through Springfield. Bat-
teries and flotillas of orators spoke. They argued, threat-
ened, promised, appealed to statistics, passions, history. But
the high chosen spokesman of the party had little or nothing
to say. He wrote a few letters, and shook hands with ora-
tors, politicians and reporters who came by the dozen and
score to the house on Eighth Street. He spoke August 8
when railroads, buggies, horses and ox wagons brought
50,0Q0 people to Springfield. He greeted them; the "fight
for this cause" would go on "though I be dead and gone."
He ended: "You will kindly let me be silent."

Follet, Foster & Company announced a biography of Lin-
coln, authorized by him, which brought his outburst, "I
have scarcely been so much astounded by anything, as by
their public announcement ... I certainly knew they con-
templated publishing a biography, and I certainly did not
object to their doing so, upon their own responsibility." He
had even helped them. But, "At the same time, I made my-
self tiresome, if not hoarse, with repeating to Mr. Howard,
their only agent seen by me, my protest that I authorized
nothing — would be responsible for nothing."

Five hack biographies sprouted in June. Later came more
pretentious ,and competent biographies, bound in boards,
one by William Dean Howells, the best by D. W. Bartlett,
a 354-page volume with a steel engraving of Lincoln. Six

294

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

editions were printed of the New York. Tribune's impressive
Political Text Book for I860, 248 pages of the most notable
speeches and documents of all parties. In campaign litera-
ture the Republicans far surpassed the Democrats. Medals
and coins were struck, one medal praising soap on one side
and the candidate on the other. Requests for autographs
flooded in. Wendell Phillips was asking, "Who is this
huckster in politics?" Seward was saying, "No truer de-
fender of the Republican faith could have been found."

Newspapers came, estimating Lincoln as "a third-rate
country lawyer"; he lived "in low Hoosier style"; he "could
not speak good grammar"; he delivered "coarse and clumsy
jokes"; he was descended from "an African gorilla." Letters
asked his view on this or that. And secretary John G. Nico-
lay sent all the same answer; his positions were well known
when he was nominated; he must not now "embarrass the
canvass."

Slimy, putrid and reeking, was an article in the Macomb,
Illinois, Eagle, in August 1860, printing what it claimed to
be "an extract of a speech made by Mr. Lincoln in 1844."
It quoted Lincoln as saying:

Mr. Jefferson is a statesman whose praises are never
out of the mouths of the Democratic party . . . The
character of Jefferson was repulsive. Continually pul-
ing about liberty, equality, and the degrading curse of
slavery, he brought his own children to the hammer,
and made money of his debaucheries. Even at his death
he did not manumit his numerous offspring, but left
them soul and body to degradation and the cart whip.
A daughter of this vaunted champion of democracy
was sold some years ago at public auction in New Or-
leans.

To one who sent him a clipping of it, Lincoln wrote, "I
do not recognize it as anything I have ever seen before,
emanating from any source. I wish my name not to be used;
but my friends will be entirely safe in denouncing the thing
as a forgery." To a Boston group who invited him to a
Jefferson birthday festival he had declined, writing:

"Mary, We're Elected" 295

Those claiming political descent from him have
nearly ceased to breathe his name everywhere . . .
soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles
of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation . . .
The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and
axioms of free society . . . All honor to Jefferson — to
the man, who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle
for national independence by a single people, had the
coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a
merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, ap-
plicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it
there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be
a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers
of re-appearing tyrany and oppression.

John Locke Scripps, a Chicago Tribune editor, had a
long interview with Lincoln, and on his request Lincoln
wrote for his use a 2,500-word autobiography. From this
Scripps wrote a 32-page close-print pamphlet titled "Life of
Abraham Lincoln." Scripps wrote to a brother, "I have
been getting out a campaign Life of Lincoln for the million
which is published simultaneously by us [the Chicago Trib-
une] and by the New York Tribune" Though Scripps was
rushed, and wrote against time, he produced a little book
packed with a charming readable story having documents
and dignity. A million copies at five cents apiece meant
millions of readers now had a few answers to, "Who and
what is Abraham Lincoln, his folks, his ways, his looks, his
home, his beliefs and policies?" His education? "He was
never in a college or an academy as a student, and was
never, in fact, inside of a college or academy building until
after he had commenced the practice of the law. He studied
English grammar after he was twenty-three years of age;
... he studied the six books of Euclid after he had served
a term in Congress, and when he was forty years of age,
amid the pressure of an extensive legal practice." He knew
about hard work from "splitting rails, pulling the cross-cut
and the whip-saw, driving the frower, plowing, harrowing,
planting, hoeing, harvesting." He knew about sports. "In
wrestling, jumping, running, throwing the maul and pitching

296

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

the crow-bar, he always stood first among those of his own
age."

Scripps in his book quoted Douglas as saying in one de-
bate in 1858, "Lincoln is one of those peculiar men who
perform with admirable skill everything they undertake."
And Scripps wrote further: In many cases where "a poor
client" had "justice and right on his side," Mr. Lincoln
charged no fee and sometimes quietly slipped the client a
five or ten dollar bill. His Mexican War record, his bill to
abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, the debates with
Douglas were elaborately documented. And personally, his
six-feet-four-inch frame "is not muscular, but gaunt and
wiry. In walking, his gait, though firm, is never brisk. He
steps slowly and deliberately, almost always with his head
inclined forward, and his hands clasped behind his back."
At rest, his features were not handsome, "but when his fine,
dark-grey eyes are lighted up by any emotion, and his fea-
tures begin their play, he would be chosen from among a
crowd as one who had in him not only the kindly sentiments
which women love, but the heavier metal of which full-
grown men and Presidents are made." As to religion, "He
... is a pew-holder and liberal supporter of the Presby-
terian Church in Springfield, to which Mrs. Lincoln be-
longs." Scripps believed of Lincoln, "He has an exquisite
sense of justice." On only this one point was Lincoln found
"exquisite." Of the millions who read the pamphlet biogra-
phy, many sat brooding, inquiring, thoughtful, about this
fabulous human figure of their own time.

In this summer of 1860 Lincoln saw a powerful young
political party shaping his figure into heroic stature, color-
ing his personality beyond reality. From hundreds of stump
orators and newspapers came praise and outcry for "Abe,"
"Old Abe," "the Rail Candidate," "the Backwoodsman,"
"Honest Abe," "the Man of the People," the sagacious, elo-
quent Man of the Hour, one who starting from a dirt-floor
cabin was to move into the Executive Mansion in Washing-
ton.

What men there had been who had gone up against the
test and gone down before it! What heartbreaking challenge
there was in the act of heading a government where vast

"Mary, We're Elected" 297

sensitive property interests and management problems called
for practical executive ability, while millions of people
hungered for some mystic bread of life, for land, roads,
freedom. They were the titanic, breathing, groaning, snarl-
ing, singing, murmuring, irreckonable instrument through
which, and on which, history, destiny, politicians worked —
The People — the public that had to be reached for the mak-
ing of public opinion.

Chicago politicians were saying Lincoln seemed to be in
"rough everyday rig" in his pictures. Lincoln had written
he would be "dressed up" if Hesler, the Chicago photogra-
pher, came to Springfield. And Hesler made four fine nega-
tives of Lincoln in a stiff-bosomed, pleated shirt with pearl
buttons. Volk, the sculptor, arrived, had a rose bouquet
from Mrs. Lincoln, and presented her with a bust of her
husband. A round stick was needed for Lincoln's hands
while Volk made casts. Lincoln stepped out to the wood-
shed and returned to the dining room whittling a broom
handle. The edges didn't need such careful whittling, Volk
remarked. "Oh, well, I thought I would like to have it
nice." Sitting for one portrait, as the likeness emerged
Lincoln said, "There's the animal himself."

Douglas stumped the country in what seemed for him a
losing fight; he went on tireless, men amazed at the way he
wore out, went to bed, and came back fighting. At Norfolk,
Virginia, in late August he told an audience of 7,000 that
he wanted no votes except from men who desired the
Union to be preserved. On a slip of paper handed him was
the question whether, if the South seceded, he would advise
resistance by force. To this he flashed, "I answer emphat-
ically that it is the duty of the President of the United
States and all others in authority under him to enforce the
laws of the United States as passed by Congress and as the
courts expound them ... In other words, I think the Presi-
dent of the United States, whoever he may be, should treat
all attempts to break up resistance to its laws as Old Hick-
ory treated the Nullifiers in 1832." At Raleigh, North
Carolina, he said he would "hang every man higher than
Hainan" who resisted Constitutional law. No Illinoisan

298

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

would ever consent to pay duty on corn shipped down the
Mississippi. "We furnish the water that makes the great
river, and we will follow it throughout its whole course to
the ocean, no matter who or what may stand before us."

At places in the North he favored "burying Southern dis-
unionism and Northern abolitionism in the same grave,"
saying, too, that if Old Hickory were alive he would "hang
Northern and Southern traitors on the same gallows." The
Pacific railway and other dreams would never come true
"unless you banish forever the slavery question from the
halls of Congress and remand it to the people of each state
and territory."

In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on news in October of Republi-
cans sweeping Pennsylvania, Douglas turned to his secre-
tary, "Mr. Lincoln is the next President," adding, "We must
try to save the Union. I will go South." In Tennessee, Geor-
gia and Alabama, he spoke to large crowds, often amid
threats and jeers of thugs and rotten fruit and eggs meant
to reach his head. In Atlanta, Alexander Stephens, though
Douglas was not his first choice for President, introduced
Douglas with warm praise. Harassed arid in sinking health,
Douglas spoke in the Deep South with passion and storm in
his voice of the love he held for the Union and his scorn
of those who would break up the Union. Mr. Lincoln in
Springfield must have been deeply moved when he read
some of these Douglas speeches.

Letters kept coming to Lincoln — what would he do with
slavery if elected? Would he interfere? Would it not be
wise now to say plainly he wouldn't interfere? One he had
answered, "Those who will not read, or heed, what I have
already publicly said, would not read, or heed, a repetition
of it." He wrote to a pro-Douglas Louisville editor, "I have
bad men also to deal with, both North and South, — men
who are eager for something new upon which to base new
misrepresentations, — men who would like to frighten me,
or, at least fix upon me the character of timidity and cow-
ardice."

He wrote Swett about a matter concerning Weed and
others, his main point in one sentence, "It can not have
failed to strike you that these men ask for just, the same

"Mary, We're Elected" 299

thing — fairness, and fairness only." But he ended the letter,
"Burn this, not that there is any thing wrong in it; but be-
cause it is best not to be known that I write at all."

When the notification committee had called, he soberly
brought them a pitcher of ice water. Mrs. Lincoln was ail
ready with bottles of champagne but Koerner warned that
wouldn't do; it would be told against them. Lincoln loos- ,
ened the stiff occasion by calling on a tall judge to stand up
and measure height with him.

The campaign came to its last week. As the summer and
fall drew on he was to those who met him the same friendly
neighbor as always — but with more to think about. He
shook hands with Whitney in a big crowd, and a half -hour
later, seeing Whitney again, he shook hands and called him
by name. *§ie didn't know me the first time," said Whitney.

Millions of people had by this time read his words of two
years ago in the House Divided speech. They struck the
soft, weird keynote of the hour. "If we could first know
where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then
better judge what to do, and how to do it."

Twice, since he had first so spoken, the corn had grown
from seed to the full stalk and been harvested. In a book he
had carried, it was told, "All rising to power is by a wind-
ing stair." As he went higher it was colder and lonelier. The
last leaves were blowing off the trees and the final geese
honking south. Winter would come and go before seed corn
went into the ground again.

Early reports on election evening, November 6 r gave
Douglas 3,598 votes and Lincoln 3,556 in Sangamon
County while in Springfield Lincoln had 1,395 against
1,326 for Douglas. From nine o'clock on he sat in the
Springfield telegraph office. Lincoln with friends stepped
across the street to where the Republican Ladies' Club had
fixed a supper. The ladies rushed him. "How do you do,
Mr. President?" Hardly were the men seated when a mes-
senger rushed in waving a telegram. New York had gone
Republican. Lincoln's election was clinched.

In the streets, and around the Statehouse, crowds surged,
shouting themselves hoarse. The jubilee was still going as

300 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

Lincoln walked home to say to a happy woman, "Mary,
we're elected." The local Journal was saying, "Our city is
as quiet as a young lady who has just found out that she is
in love."

In Mobile, Alabama, Douglas had told a large audience
that their rights would be far safer in the Union than out-
side. In the office of the Register he read dispatches. They
told him only what he had expected. He tried to read th§
coming events in the light of his knowing from high sources
that scores of powerful Southern leaders had their plans for
secession on the election of Lincoln. He knew what his
course would be. He had told the South what it would be.
He was tired and sad but he had spent his life in storms
and was ready for the next one.

The national count gave Lincoln 1,866,452 votes; Doug-
las, 1,376,957; Breckenridge, 849,781; Bell, 588,879. Lin-
coln had majorities in 17 Free States, Breckinridge carried
11 Slave States, Bell 3 Slave States. In the electoral college
Douglas had only the 3 votes of New Jersey and the 9 of
Missouri. The total electoral college votes looked a little
silly, giving dim light on the popular balloting, with Lin-
coln, 180; Breckinridge, 72; Bell, 39; Douglas, 12. In a total
of some 4,700,000 votes the other combined candidates
had nearly a million more votes than Lincoln. Fifteen states
gave him no electoral votes; in ten states of the South he
didn't get a count of one popular vote. He was the most
sectionally elected President the nation had ever had and
the fact would be dinned into his ears.

Events marched and masked their meanings. Facts were
gathering motion, whisking into new shapes and disguises
every day. Dream shapes of future events danced into sight
and out of sight, faded and came again, before a whirligig
of triple mirrors.

Chapter 15

The House Dividing

Lincoln's election was a signal. The Atlanta newspaper,
Confederacy, spoke for those who had visions of violence:
"Let the consequences be what they may — whether the Po-
tomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Ave-
nue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies, or
whether the last vestige of liberty is swept from the face of
the American continent, the South will never submit to such
humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abra-
ham Lincoln." This was in part bravado and blowoff and in
part hope and determination.

Equally flaring and vivid in Boston was Wendell Phillips,
speaking for an abolitionist faction: "Let the South march
off, with flags and trumpets, and we will speed the parting
guest . . . All hail, disunion! . . . Let the border states go.
Then we part friends. The Union thus ended, the South no
longer hates the North . . . The laws of trade will bind us
together, as they do all other lands." Mildly the innocent-
faced Greeley chimed in, "Let the erring sisters depart in
peace."

In North Carolina, the Raleigh Banner spoke for a small
segment of the South: "The big heart of the people is still
in the Union. Less than a hundred politicians are endeavor-
ing to destroy the liberties and usurp the rights of more
than thirty millions of people. If the people permit it, they
deserve the horrors of the civil war which will ensue."

South Carolina legislators voted to raise and equip
10,000 volunteer soldiers; Georgia voted $1,000,000 and
Louisiana $500,000 for guns and men. Robert Toombs was
saying: "It is admitted that you seek to outlaw $4,000,-
000,000 of property of our people ... Is not that a cause
of war?" But was secession the safest immediate way of

302

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

managing this property? Jefferson Davis had hopes and
doubts. And Alexander Stephens had written, "I consider
slavery much more secure in the Union than out of it if our
people were but wise."

In the day's mail for Lincoln came letters cursing him for
an ape and a baboon who had brought the country evil. He
was buffoon and monster; an abortion, an idiot; they prayed
he would be flogged, burned, hanged, tortured. Pen sketches
of gallows and daggers arrived from "oath-bound brother-
hoods." Mrs. Lincoln saw unwrapped a painting on canvas,
her husband with a rope around his neck, his feet chained,
his body tarred and feathered.

A Tennessee woman wrote of her dream about how to
keep out of war. Another suggested he should have all his
food tasted. Still another letter told Lincoln to resign at
the inaugural and appoint Douglas as the new President.

A chemist and metal-worker, A. W. Flanders of Burling-
ton, Iowa, in letters to Nicolay, explained with intelligent
detail that he could have made secretly a shirt of mail, of
flexible chain armor, "plated with gold so that perspiration
shall not affect it. It could be covered with silk and worn
over an ordinary undershirt." Flanders would "be very
happy to get this done for Mr. Lincoln," but his kindly and
generous offer could not be accepted.

On the way to Chicago November 21 Lincoln , made a
two-minute speech at Bloomington, referred to the ex-
pressed will of the people, and, "I think very much of the
people, as an old friend said he thought of woman. He
said when he lost his first wife, who had been a great help
to him in his business, he thought he was ruined — that he
could never find another to fill her place. At length, how-
ever, he married another . . . and that his opinion now was
that any woman would do well who was well done by"

In Chicago, as he had arranged by letters, he met Vice-
President-elect Hamlin and Joshua Speed. He wasn't sure
he had ever before met Hamlin but he had heard him speak
in the Senate. Hamlin couldn't remember having met Lin-
coln but he had heard him in the House in a speech that
had "auditors convulsed with laughter." People so crowded

The House Dividing 303

in on the two important men in the Tremont House that
they went for their conference to a private home. Lincoln
wished in appointments to hold a balance between Whigs
who had turned Republican and Democrats who had turned
Republican. He would trust Hamlin to name the New Eng-
land member of his Cabinet for Secretary of the Navy, giv-
ing Hamlin three names he inclined to favor, Hamlin de-
ciding on a former Jackson Democrat, Gideon Welles, a
Hartford editor.

They both favored Seward for Secretary of State. Lincoln
soon after wrote one short letter notifying Seward he would
appoint him Secretary of State and a longer letter giving
Seward Lincoln's belief "that your position in the public
eye, your integrity, ability, learning," made the appoint-
ment "pre-eminently fit." These two letters Lincoln sent to
Hamlin, writing, "Consult with Judge Trumbull; and if you
and he see no reason to the contrary, deliver the letter to
Governor Seward at once. If you see reason to the contrary,
write me at once." Trumbull wasn't eager about Seward but
he consented; so Hamlin delivered Lincoln's two letters to
Seward, and Seward, after pretending to think deeply about
it, accepted.

With Joshua Speed, Lincoln discussed the outlook in
Kentucky, possible appointments there, and casually asked
Speed how he was fixed for money, income, wherewithal.
Speed flashed back that he knew why Lincoln was asking
such a question and he didn't need any office Lincoln could
offer him, which pleased them both.

The trains into Springfield on a single day would unload
hundreds of passengers, arriving to see the President-elect.
Some carried shining faces; they just wanted to look at him
and tell him they hoped to God he'd live and have good
luck. Others, too, carried shining faces, singing, "Ain't we
glad we joined the Republicans?" They said they nominated
and elected him President, and inquired about post offices,
revenue collectorships, clerkships, secretaryships. They
wore him. Behind their smiles some had snouts like buz-
zards, pigs, rats. They were pap-seekers, sapsuckers, chair-
warmers, hammock-heroes, the office-sniffing mob that

304

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

had killed Zach Taylor, that had killed Tippecanoe Harri-
son. They wore Lincoln — worse than the signs of war.

The office seekers watched Lincoln's habits, waylaid him,
wedged in, and reminded him not to forget them. If person-
ally refused, they sent appeals again to Lincoln's ear
through friends. One who kept coming, by one device and
another pressing claims on Lincoln, was Judge Davis. As
Whitney told it: "Lincoln inveighed to me in the bitterest
terms against Judge Davis' greed and importunity for office,
and summarized his disgust in these words, 'I know it is an
awful thing for me to say, but I already wish some one else
was here in my place.' "

Smart alecks came, often committees of them, guffawing
at their own lame jokes, with thrusts of familiarity at Lin-
coln as though they might next be tickling him in the ribs.
Whitney saw Lincoln one afternoon, with smiling humor,
usher the last member of such a committee out of the door,
and Whitney remarked, "I wish I could take as rose-colored
a view of the situation as you seem to." Lincoln's smiles had
all crept back into the leathery fissures of his face, as he
told Whitney: "I hope you don't feel worse about it than I
do. I can't sleep nights."

Strong-hearted, black-eyed Hannah Armstrong came, the
widow of Jack, the mother of Duff. Lincoln took her two
hands. They talked, homely and heart-warming talk. He
held the hands that had been good to him, so long ago,
when he was young and the sap ran wild in him. And as she
was going: 'They'll kill ye, Abe." "Hannah, if they do kill
me, I shall never die another death."

The gray-bearded, quiet-mannered Judge Edward Bates
on invitation visited Lincoln, and consented to be U.S. At-
torney General, "a fine antique," ran one comment. Against
Indiana and Illinois factions, Lincoln kept a convention
pledge to appoint Caleb B. Smith of Indiana, a garden-vari-
ety spoils politician, to be Secretary of the Interior. Norman
B. Judd, the Republican state chairman, wanted this or
some other Cabinet place but couldn't swing it; Judge
Davis worked against him and so did Mrs. Lincoln in writ-
ing Davis a letter of bitter dislike for Judd.

Thurlow Weed came from Albany, on Swett writing him

The House Dividing 305

that Lincoln wanted to see him about Cabinet matters. They
talked politics and issues in general. Would Bates of Mis-
souri do for Attorney General? Yes, Weed was sure; he
paid tribute to Bates' personal reliability. Telegrams had
come from prominent Republicans trying to head off ap-
pointments Weed might seek, Lincoln told the New York
leader.

Lincoln had long trained himself to put men at their ease
while pumping them with quiet questions, learning by ask-
ing, and asking with keen, soft persistence. He knew that
Weed was in touch with such men of power as A. T. Stew-
art, leading New York merchant, and August Belmont,
New York representative of the Rothschilds, international
bankers, and one of the northern capitalists to whom the
South was in debt $200,000,000. Also Lincoln learned in
elaborate detail how Weed hated and feared radicals North
and South and favored all possible conciliation and appease-
ment of the South.

Salmon P. Chase, newly elected U.S. Senator from Ohio,
came by invitation. Lincoln said he "wasn't exactly pre-
pared" to appoint Chase Secretary of the Treasury, but if
he did, would Chase accept? Chase wouldn't promise. He'd
think it over. And he went away to line up friends to put
pressure on Lincoln to appoint him.

Simon Cameron came and after long talks left with a
letter signed by Lincoln:

I think fit to notify you now, that by your permis-
sion, I shall, at the proper time, nominate you to the
U.S. Senate, for confirmation as Secretary of the Treas-
ury, or as Secretary of War — which of the two, I have
not definitely decided. Please answer at your own ear-
liest convenience.

Cameron's enemies brought evidence to Lincoln intended to
show that Cameron was "the very incarnation of corrup-
tion" and his fortune "acquired by means forbidden to the
man of honor." Lincoln wrote Cameron another letter;
things had developed which made it impossible to take him
into the Cabinet. Would he write a letter publicly declin-

306

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

ing any Cabinet place? And Cameron's answer was a bundle
of recommendations outnumbering the opposition three to
one; Lincoln later wrote Cameron that he wouldn't make a
Cabinet appointment for Pennsylvania without consulting
him.

Donn Piatt, an Ohio journalist, left Springfield to say,
"Lincoln told us he felt like a surveyor in the wild woods of
the West, who, while looking for a corner, kept an eye over
his shoulder for an Indian."

Henry Villard earlier had written of Lincoln: "More than
once I heard him *with malice aforethought' get off pur-
posely some repulsive fiction in order to rid himself of an
uncomfortable caller. Again and again I felt disgust and
humiliation that such a person should have been called
upon to direct the destinies of a great nation." Villard later
still, reporting for the New York Herald, judged the Presi-
dent-elect "a man of good heart and good intentions," but
"not firm." Weeks passed and he definitely saw Lincoln as
"a man of immense power and force of character and natu-
ral talent ... a man to act and decide for himself . . . tre-
mendously rough and tremendously honest and earnest."
Thus judgments, in favor and against, shifted as the winds
shift.

"Resistance to Lincoln is Obedience to God!" flared a
banner at an Alabama mass meeting; an orator swore that
if need be their troops would march to the doors of the
national Capitol over "fathoms of mangled bodies."

Against Southern advice that South Carolina wait till
President Buchanan's term ended, Robert Barnwell Rhett
and his forces had manipulated the precise dramatic event
of secession. As a Congressman of six terms and a U.S.
Senator of one term, as editor of the Charleston Mercury,
as lawyer and churchman, as manager of the Charleston
Bible Society, as vice-president of the Young Men's Tem-
perance Society, as secretary of the Charleston Port Society
for promoting the Christian gospel among seamen, as the
father of 12 children, the driving motive of Rhett's life was
to win secession and Southern independence, build a con-
federacy on the cornerstone of African slavery, and restore

' "1

The House Dividing 307

the African slave trade outlawed by the U.S. Constitution
as of 1808. Rhett organized "minutemen" and vigilance
committees, to make sure of delegates pledged to secession.
He wrote the ordinance of disunion, and in secret session
the convention's 169 delegates in St. Andrew's Hall at
Charleston, December 16, 1860, passed it without debate
in 45 minutes. A newly adopted flag brought a great shout,
rocked the hall, and from lowlands to upcountry were bells,
bonfires, torchlights, parades, shotgun salutes and cries of
jubilee. One by one the six other Cotton States of the lower
South joined South Carolina in leaving the Union.

Senators and Representatives from the South spoke sad
and bitter farewells to Congress; U.S. postmasters, judges,
district attorneys, customs collectors, by the hundreds sent
their resignations to Washington. Of the 1,108 officers of
the U.S. Regular Army, 387 were preparing resignations,
many having already joined the Confederate armed forces.
The U.S. mint at New Orleans and two smaller mints were
taken over by the Confederate States, as were post offices
and customhouses. Governors of seceded states marched in
troops and took over U.S. forts that had cost $6,000,000.

Reports flew that Southern forces would seize Washing-
ton, Lincoln to be sworn in at some other place. Twenty-two
carloads of troops were starting from Fort Leavenworth
across Missouri for Baltimore. Cameron of Pennsylvania
was saying, "Lincoln, if living, will take the oath of office
on the Capitol steps." Dr. William Jayne of Springfield
wrote to Trumbull, "Lincoln advised he would rather be
hanged by the neck till he was dead on the steps of the
Capitol than buy or beg a peaceful inauguration." Newly
organized artillery companies were drilling in Chicago. A
thousand Negro slaves were throwing up fortifications in
Charleston, South Carolina. Governor Yates notified the
legislature, "Illinois counts among her citizens 400,000 who
can bear arms." Five million dollars and a hundred thou-
sand troops would be offered by their state, Pennsylvania
legislators were saying.

"The Revolution" was the top headline under which a
New York daily paper assembled the news of the country.
Nine columns were required on one day to report declara-

308

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

tions of Southern conventions, and resignations from the
Army, Navy and training academies. Stephens of Georgia
had dug into history. "Revolutions are much easier started
than controlled, and the men who begin them, even for the
best purposes and object, seldom end them."

The New York Herald, circulating 77,000 copies daily,
earning profits of $300,000 a year, advised in ah editorial,
"A grand opportunity now exists for Lincoln to avert im-
pending ruin, and invest his name with an immortality far
more enduring than would attach to it by his elevation to the
Presidency. His withdrawal at this time from the scene of
conflict, and the surrender of his claims to some national
man who would be acceptable to both sections, would ren-
der him the peer of Washington in patriotism." And the
Herald added: "If he persists in his present position ... he
will totter into a dishonoured grave, driven there perhaps by
the hands of an assassin, leaving behind him a memory
more excrable than that of Arnold — more despised than
that of the traitor Catiline."

Senator Jefferson Davis, pale and just risen from a sick-
bed, in January spoke his words of parting: "I offer you
my apology for any thing I may have done in the Senate,
and I go remembering no injury I have received." His re-
grets coupled to a warning: "There will be no peace if you
so will it." Swiftly, on Davis' walking out forever, Senator
William M. Gwin of California would vote $100,000,000
for a Pacific railway. But Crittenden of Kentucky said that,
with the Union "reeling about like a drunken man," he
could not see a Pacific railway. "Build up the Union first;
then talk about building up a railroad."

If Lincoln should try to retake the seized forts, he would
have to kill in sickening numbers, said John Y. Brown of
Kentucky. "From the blood of your victims, as from the
fabled dragons' teeth, will spring up crops of armed men,
whose religion it will be to hate and curse you." "Very well,
sir," said Thaddeus Stevens. "Rather than show repentance
for the election of Mr. Lincoln, with all its consequences, I
would see this Government crumble into a thousand
atoms."

Lincoln delivered remarks such as, "Please excuse me . . .

The House Dividing 309

from making a speech," and, "Let us at all times remember
that all American citizens are brothers of a common coun-
try." He indicated in letters to Trumbull, Washburne and
others at Washington they must stand for no further spread
of slavery. 4f On that point hold firm, as with a chain of
steel," he counseled, and warned, "The tug has to come, &
better now, than any time hereafter." His close friend, Ed-
ward D. Baker, now U.S. Senator from Oregon, told the
Senate that Lincoln would respect the Fugitive Slave Law.
Also, Lincoln told friends privately that the forts seized by
the seceded states would have to be retaken. But as to public
declarations of policy on this and that, he was waiting.

Congressman William Kellogg of Canton, Illinois, one of
the few most favored by Lincoln in patronage, held a long
conference with Lincoln in Springfield January 21. Then
Kellogg went to Washington, spoke for a mild compromise
in his bill for extension of slavery into all new territories to
be formed south of 36° 30'; he was howled down by the
radicals of his party, and read out of the party by the Chi-
cago Tribune — as both he and Lincoln had probably ex-
pected. One result of this Kellogg proposal was that the
Unionist Democrats of southern Illinois, Indiana and Ohio,
near the Slave State borders, could say td their people that
when the Southern States left the Union, there was still a
chance for slavery extension into the western territories.
Then, too, the Slave States of Missouri and Kentucky had
a fresh argument for staying in the Union. The action was
mazy.

In the very air of the City of Washington was coming a
sense of change, of an impending program to be wrought
out on historic anvils in smoke and mist, of old bonds and
moorings broken, of a formerly confident and dominant
class giving way to an element a little raw and new to gov-
ernment and diplomacy, young and strange in its champing
and chafing.

In the White House Buchanan suggested gently, 'The
election of any one of our citizens to the office of President
does not of itself afford just cause for dissolving the Union."
He could meditate on his serving as a private in the War of

310

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

1812 nearly 50 years before, of his horseback ride through
bluegrass Kentucky, his temptation to settle in law practice
there, and his going back to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Elected a Congressman, he lived on, a bachelor, always
reserved as to women. An estate of $300,000, out of 40
years of public officeholding, gave him little ease now, nor
the comment "Buchanan has a winning way of making him-
self hateful."

He argued that seceded states had no right to secede, yet
the Federal Government had no right to use force to stop
them from seceding. He urged, however, the right of the
Federal Government to use force against individuals, in
spite of secession, to enforce Federal laws and hold Federal
property. Yet his words lacked action to give them force.
He wrote letters, negotiated, conferred, sent messengers,
employed moral suasion against an organization making
elaborate preparations to use guns. To Congressman Morrill
of Vermont he was like an old man chuckling to his rowdy
sons, "Don't, but if I were you I would, and I can't help it
if you do."

One comfort to him was his niece, Harriet Lane, robust,
with golden-brown hair, violet-blue eyes, a graduate of the
Visitation Convent near Washington. A warship had been
named for her, also a race horse, a flower, a fashionable
gown and many a newborn girl child. "No American
woman ever had more offers of marriage than Harriet
Lane." Her uncle wrote the caution, "Never allow your af-
fections to become interested, or engage yourself to any
person, without my previous advice." They were chums; she
shared as no others did his political secrets, with his warn-
ings often not to tell others, for they "must tell it or burst."

While a hurricane was preparing, these two careful per-
sons lived with their mild secrets in the White House. "Be
quiet and discreet and say nothing" — the written advice of
the old man to his niece was his own guiding motto. Once
he termed himself "an old public functionary." "I at least
meant well for my country," ran a line of his January mes-
sage to Congress. To many he seemed half apparition, ready
for the graveclothes that would swathe a past epoch.

Now they snarled in dog-fight tones in the halls of Con-

The House Dividing 31 1

gress. Now the radical abolitionist Ben Wade of Ohio kept a
sawed-off shotgun in his desk. "Better for us that the fruitful
earth be smitten and become dry dust," mourned Tom Cor-
win. "Better that the heavens for a time become brass and
the ear of God deaf to our prayers; better that Famine with
her cold and skinny fingers lay hold upon the throats of our
wives and children . . . than that we should prove faithless
to our trust ... and all our bright hopes die out in that
night which knows no coming dawn." This was a psalm for
the people to hear. To Lincoln he sent an epistle for Lin-
coln's eye only:

... I cannot comprehend the madness of the times.
Southern men are theoretically crazy. Extreme North-
ern men are practical fools. The latter are really
quite as mad as the former. Treason is in the air
around us everywhere. It goes by the name of patri-
otism. Men in Congress boldly avow it, and the public
offices are full of acknowledged secessionists. God
alone, I fear, can help us. Four or five States are gone,
others are driving before the gale. I have looked on this
horrid picture till I have been able to gaze on it . with
perfect calmness. I think, if you live, you may take
the oath.

His dark words were addedly profound coming from the
best wit and storyteller in Washington.

Only the hard of hearing had not heard of the Crittenden
Compromise that winter. All territory north of the southern
boundary line of Missouri to the Pacific Ocean would be
free soil forever, and all territory south of that line would
be slave soil forever, by Constitutional amendment, said the
Crittenden Compromise; Congress would be forbidden ever
to abolish slavery or interfere with it in Slave States or in
the District of Columbia; the U.S. Government would pay
slaveowners for slave property lost through action of mobs
or law courts in the North. Thus Crittenden would bargain
with the seceded states hoping they would stay in the Union.
Who could blame Old Man Crittenden of Kentucky for this
plan from his head, and heart? Of his two strong sons, Tom

312

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

was for the Union and the Constitution and George was for
secession and the Confederacy. And he wept over the
House Divided.

Behind his compromise rallied Douglas, Edward D.
Baker, Edward Everett, Thurlow Weed, August Belmont,
Cyrus McCormick, many powerful newspapers, including
the New York Herald, and such authentic and lovable advo-
cates of peace as Tom Corwin. Petitions in its favor came
to the Senate chamber in bales and stacks. The Crittenden
Compromise marched up the hill, then down again; the
forces against it had been long in growing and breeding. Be-
hind each event operating for peace came another to cancel
it.

General Winfield Scott, 75-year-old Virginian, military
head of the U.S. Government, with headquarters in Win-
der's Building opposite the War Department, most often
was to be found resting on an office sofa. At Chapultepec,
Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, in the Mexican War he had held
his saddle and ordered long marches and storming attacks
and mapped the campaigns and run the armies. Six feet fivtf
inches tall, 300 pounds in weight, in shining gold braid and
buttons, in broad epaulets and a long plumed hat, when he
walked he seemed almost a parade by himself. Small boys
waited of a morning to see him come out of his house and
move like six regiments toward a waiting carriage. What
with age, dropsy, vertigo and old bullets to carry, he could
no longer mount a horse. To Scott's request for men and
guns to garrison nine Southern forts against seizure, Bu-
chanan wrote that to grant it would show on his part "a
degree of inconsistency amounting almost to self -stultifica-
tion." An Illinois Congressman presented his respects to
General Scott with word from the President-elect, 'Tell
him, confidentially, I shall be obliged to him to be as well
prepared as he can, to either hold or retake the forts, as the
case may require, at and after the inauguration."

With inauguration day a few weeks off, letters warned
Lincoln he would be killed before he reached Washington.
He sent Thomas S. Mather, adjutant general of Illinois, to
Washington to sound Winfield Scott on his loyalty. Mather
came* back to report he had found the Mexican War hero

The House Dividing 313

propped up with pillows, in bed, an old worn man with
flesh in rolls over face and neck. His breathing heavy, he
half choked and wheezed out the words: "Say to him that,
when once here, I shall consider myself responsible for his
safety. If necessary I'll plant cannon at both ends of Penn-
sylvania Avenue, and if any show their hands or even ven-
ture to raise a finger, I'll blow them to hell."

Delegates at Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4 or-
ganized a provisional government named the Confederate
States of America, electing Jefferson Davis of Mississippi
as President and Alexander Stephens of Georgia as Vice-
President. Second to Robert Barnwell Rhett as a torch of
revolution was William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama. And
yet, in the seats of high power sat neither Yancey nor Rhett.
Yancey and other extremists would have liked Rhett to be
President. But a moderate element took the power, men
who would rather have waited, who would have held a con-
vention and presented demands to the North. In their newly
adopted constitution they struck directly at Rhett, Yancey
and the slave traders, and bid for international good will by
expressly forbidding the African slave trade for all time.

Conventions in North Carolina and Arkansas deliberated,
and joined the Confederacy. In Tennessee the voters bal-
loted 105,000 to 47,000 in favor of secession, Union votes
coming heavy from the mountaineers. In Virginia, three to
one of 130,000 voters were in favor of "the Mother of
Presidents" going into the Confederacy, the mountaineers
chiefly being Unionist. In Texas, Governor Sam Houston
refused to call the legislature and tried to stop secession, but
was bowled over.

The California Senator, James A. McDougall, once an
Eighth Circuit lawyer in Illinois, jingling his Mexican spurs
like sleigh bells, his trousers thrust in his boots and his
boots lifted on his senatorial desk, could see "as many
minds as men and no end of wrangling," and was only sure,
"I believe in women, wine, whiskey, and war." The less lush
Henry Adams of Massachusetts was writing a brother, "No
man is fit to take hold now who is not as cool as (death."

314 THE PRAIRIE YEARS

It was sunset and dawn, moonrise and noon, dying time
and birthing hour, dry leaves of the last of autumn and
springtime blossom roots.

Chapter 16

"I Bid You an Affectionate Farewell"

When a Brooklyn hatter one January day presented Lincoln
with a black silk hat, he turned to say, "Well, wife, if noth-
ing else comes out of this scrape, we are going to have some
new clothes." Such attentions pleased Mrs. Lincoln. She
had a sprightly manner of saying, "We are pleased with our
advancement." In the hustle of deciding what to take along
to the White House, when asked about many things to be
done or not done, she would sometimes burst out, "God,
no!" One winter morning she was burning papers in the
alley when Jared P. Irwin, a neighbor, asked if he could
have some of them. She said he was welcome and Irwin
scraped from the fire several of the most interesting letters
written by Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln to each other.

Pressure came on her to give her husband the names of
men he should appoint to offices, with reasons why. Of one
woman for whose husband she got a fat office, Mrs. Lin-
coln told another woman, "She little knows what a hard
battle I had for it, and how near he came to getting noth-
ing." She spoke of fears about her health, would mention
"my racked frame" to other women, and say she hoped the
chills she suffered from in earlier years would not return to
Washington. She might find Washington a city of tears and
shadows. She would go there with new clothes, fresh rib-
bons, and see. She made a trip in January to New York
City, there meeting Robert, who came down from Harvard.
She had as good a time as possible for her, choosing and
buying gowns, hats, footwear and adornments becoming to
one to be called "the First Lady of the Land."

"Affectionate Farewell"

315

/ Ordering things to wear, she could write instructions, "I
f am in need of two bonnets — I; do not wish expensive ones,
but I desire them of very fine quality and stylish." She
wrote specifications to the milliner. "One bonnet, I wish
fine, very fine, pretty shape. This I desire, to be trimmed
with black love ribbons — with pearl edge. I cannot have it
without the latter . . ." Villard wrote for the New York
Herald January 26 of the President-elect "delighted" at
the return of Mrs. Lincoln and Bob from the east. "Dutiful
husband and father that he is, he had proceeded to the rail-
road depot for three successive nights in his anxiety to re-
ceive them, and that in spite of snow and cold. Mrs. Lh>
coin returned in good health and excellent spirits; whether
she got a good scolding from Abraham for unexpectedly
prolonging her absence, I am unable to say; but I know she
found it rather difficult to part with the winter gayeties of
New York." Villard noted, too, that Robert, fresh from
Harvard, dressed in an elegance in "striking contrast to the
loose, careless, awkward rigging of his Presidential father."

Lincoln rode to Mattoon, missed connections with a pas-
senger train, and took the caboose of a freight train to
Charleston. With a shawl over his shoulders, and his boots
in slush, mud and ice, he picked his way in the late evening
dusk alongside the tracks the length of the freight train to
the station, where a buggy was ready. Friends took him to
the house where he stayed overnight. Next day he drove
eight miles out to an old farm. Sally Bush Lincoln and he
put their arms around each other and listened to each
other's heartbeats. They held their hands and talked, they
talked without holding hands. Each looked into eyes thrust
back in deep sockets. She was all of a mother to him. He
was her boy more than any born to her. He gave her a pho-
tograph of her boy, a hungry picture of him standing and
wanting, wanting. He stroked her face a last time, kissed
good-by and went away. She knew his heart would go roam-
ing back often, that even when he rode in an open carriage
in New York or Washington with soldiers, flags and cheer-
ing thousands along the streets, he might just as like be

316

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

thinking of her in the old log farmhouse out in Coles
County, Illinois.

The sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months
would come shifting down with healing and strength; be-
tween harvest and corn-plowing there would be rains beat-
ing and blizzards howling; and there would be the silence
after snowstorms with white drifts piled against the fences,
barns and trees.

Lincoln cleaned out files, threw away useless odds and
ends. Manuscripts he wished to preserve and didn't want to
be encumbered with in Washington, he put into a carpetbag
and gave to Elizabeth Todd Grimsley, whom he called
"Cousin Lizzie." His "literary bureau," he termed it, and
told Mrs. Grimsley to watch it with care but if he should
not return to Springfield she might dispose of the manu-
scripts as she pleased. Among them were two drafts of his
lecture "Discoveries and Inventions."

His regular secretary was a trusted, reliable, accurate,
scrupulous young man, sober as a work horse, earnest as
the multiplication table; he had freckles and reddish hair; a
young Bavarian from the Pike County Sucker, This was
John G. Nicolay, secretive, dependable, often carrying mes-
sages not to be written but whispered.

The other or second secretary, not strictly engaged as
such, was going to Washington. Lincoln had said, "We can't
take all Illinois with us down to Washington, but let Hay
come." A keen and whimsical lad, John Hay. He had been
class poet at Brown University, graduated, gone home to
Warsaw, Illinois, then to Pike County, and later to Spring-
field to study law with his Uncle Milton, who had an office
on the same floor as Lincoln & Herndon. He wrote'notes in
French to a sweetheart, and had a handsome, careless ele-
gance all the girls in Springfield liked.

Between seven and twelve o'clock on the night of Febru-
ary 6, there came to the Lincoln home several hundred "la-
dies and gentlemen," wrote one correspondent, "the political
elite of this State, and the beauty and fashion of this vicin-
ity." It was the Lincolns' good-by house party. The Presi-
dent-elect stood near the front door shaking hands and

"Affectionate Farewell"

317

nearby was Bob and Mrs. Lincoln and four of her sisters.

On one farewell day, as Lincoln was meeting people in
Johnson's Block opposite the Ghenery House, there came to
him an old farmer, in butternut jeans, who had ridden
horseback many miles since daybreak. And the old man
was bent and worn with age, and nearly blind. He had
known the Armstrongs and what Lincoln did for Duff Arm-
strong. And he came and put his old eyes close to Lincoln's
face, peered and studied the lines of the face, burst into
tears, and murmured, "It is him — it's the same" And after
mentioning the Duff Armstrong case, he shook the hand
of the President-elect and said solemnly two or three times,
"God preserve you, Mr. Lincoln."

"Lincoln is letting his whiskers grow," men were saying
in January, when his upper lip and cheeks were shaved but
a stubble left on the chin. Then in February hair had grown
over jaws, chin and throat, the upper lip shaven. This facial
design was wrought by William Florville, a Haitian-born
colored man, known as "Billy the Barber" whose shop in
Springfield dated back to 1831. For more than 20 years he
had shaved and done the haircuts of Lincoln while Lincoln
handled several real-estate title eases for Billy who owned
town lots and a farm. In his house was celebrated, it was
said, the first Catholic mass in Springfield. He wrote for
the Springfield Journal droll and charming praise of his
razor skill, had keen humor, and Lincoln while being
shaved undoubtedly picked up new funny stories.

Why Lincoln took to whiskers at this time nobody
seemed to know. A girl in New York State had written
begging him to raise a beard. An October letter from New
York signed only 'True Republicans" pleasantly but seri-
ously asked him to "cultivate whiskers and wear standing
collars." But something more than these random wishes
guided him. Herndon, Whitney, Lamon, Nicolay, heard no
explanation from him as to why after 52 years with a
smooth face he should now change.

At sunset the evening before the day set for starting to
Washington, Lincoln and Herndon sat in their office for a
long talk about their 16 years as partners. Then Lincoln
slumped on a sofa and looking up at the ceiling, mentioned

318

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

that many a time after a Herndon drunk, people tried to get
him to drop his partner and he told them that for all of his
shortcomings he believed in Herndon. Thus Herndon wrote
of it. Herndon said afterward: "I could have had any place
for which I was fitted, but I thought too much of Lincoln to
disgrace him. And I wanted to be free, drink whisky when
I pleased." Herndon had one request, however, that Lin-
coln would speak to Governor Yates and have him reap-
pointed state bank examiner, to which Lincoln agreed. As
Lincoln gathered a bundle of papers and stood ready to
leave, he told Herndon their partnership would go on, their
"shingle" stay up. As they walked down the stairs Lincoln
said he was "sick of office-holding already" and "I shudder
when I think of the tasks that are still ahead."

In a dusty third-story locked room over the store of his
brother-in-law, C. M. Smith, Lincoln, with a few books and
documents he consulted, had hidden away from all callers
while he worked on his inaugural address for March 4, in
Washington, amid the cannon to be planted by General
Scott. Two printers, sworn to secrecy, had in January set
up and run off 20 copies of the address. Weeks had gone
by. Nobody had told or been careless. The inaugural text
was still a well-kept secret.

Lamon was called from Bloomington and told: "Hill, it
looks as if we might have war. I want you with me, I must
have you." And Lamon was going along, banjo, bulldog
courage and all.

A queer dream or illusion had haunted Lincoln at times
through the winter. On election evening he had thrown
himself on a haircloth sofa at home, soon after the tele-
grams reported him President-elect. Looking into a bureau
mirror across the room he saw himself full length, but with
two faces. It bothered him; he got up; the illusion vanished;
but when he lay down again there in the glass were two
faces again, one more pale than the other. He got up again,
mixed in the election excitement, forgot about it; but it
haunted him. He told his wife and she too worried.

A few days later he tried it once more and the illusion of
the two faces again registered to his eyes. But that was the
last; the ghost since then wouldn't come back, he told his

"Affectionate Farewell"

319

wif who said it was a sign he would be elected to a second
term, and the death pallor of one face meant he wouldn't
live through his second term.

Lincoln took walks alone. Whitney ran across him in a
section of Springfield where he had no business, unless to be
walking alone. His arms were full of papers and bundles of
mail. Where was he going? "Nowhere in particular," he
told Whitney.

Clothes, furniture, books, the household goods were
packed in boxes and trunks. The family took rooms a few
days in the Chenery House; the old home was leased, horse,
buggy and cow sold off, the German-language paper turned
back to Canisius.

At the hotel Lincoln had roped his trunks himself, and
had written, "A. Lincoln, The White House, Washington,
D.C." on cards he fastened on the trunks.

A cold drizzle of rain was falling February 11 when Lin-
coln and his party of 15 were to leave Springfield on the
eight o'clock at the Great Western Railway station. Chilly
gray mist hung the circle of the prairie horizon. A short
locomotive with a flat-topped smokestack stood puffing with
a baggage car and special passenger car coupled on; a rail-
road president and superintendent were on board. A thou-
sand people crowded in and around the brick station inside
of which Lincoln was standing, and one by one came hun-
dreds of old friends, shaking hands, wishing him luck and
Godspeed, all faces solemn. Even the huge Judge Davis,
wearing a new white silk hat, was a somber figure.

A path was made for Lincoln from the station to his car;
hands stretched out for one last handshake. He hadn't in-
tended to make a speech; but on the platform of the car, as
he turned and saw his home people, he took off his hat,
stood perfectly still, and raised a hand for silence. They
stood, with hats off.

Then he spoke slowly, amid the soft gray drizzle from
the sky. Later, on the train he wrote with a pencil about
half of his speech, dictating to Nicolay the remainder of
his good-by words to Springfield: "My friends — No one,
not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at

320

THE PRAIRIE YEARS

this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people,
I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century,
and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my
children have beea born, and one is buried. I now leave,
not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a
task before me greater than that which rested upon Wash-
ington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who
ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I
cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and re-
main with you and be everywhere for good, let us confi-
dently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commend-
ing you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I
bid you an affectionate farewell."

Bells rang, there was a grinding of wheels, the train
moved and carried Lincoln away from his home town and
folks. The tears were not yet dry on some faces when the
train had faded into the gray to the east.

At Tolono station, the last stop in Illinois, he said, "I am
leaving you on an errand of national importance, attended,
as you are aware, with considerable difficulties. Let us be-
lieve, as some poet has expressed it: — 'Behind the cloud
the sun is still shining,' I bid you an affectionate farewell."

And there were voices, "Good-by, Abe."

END OF VOLUME I